The Etymology of Instance
When someone says 'for instance,' they are using a word that has completely shed its original meaning. Latin instantia meant urgency or pressing presence, from instare (to stand upon, to press), built on the mighty PIE root *steh₂- (to stand) — one of the most productive roots in the entire Indo-European family. In medieval English, 'at the instance of' meant 'at the urgent request of,' and legal documents used it to describe bringing a case to court. This legal bridge — where a case is both urgent and illustrative — allowed the word to drift toward its modern meaning of 'an example.' By the 16th century, 'for instance' was establishing itself as a common way to introduce an illustration. The urgency vanished so completely that most English speakers today have no sense of it. Computing revived a medieval echo in the 1960s when object-oriented programming adopted 'instance' to mean a specific case created from a general class definition — precisely how medieval courts treated a legal case as a specific instance of a general statute.