Origins
The word 'structure' anchors one of the most productive Latin verb families in English — the descendants of 'struere' (to pile up, build, arrange). From this single verb, English inherited a constellation of words about building, ordering, and organizing that pervades every domain from architecture to linguistics to computing.
Latin 'strūctūra' was derived from the past participle 'strūctus' of 'struere,' meaning 'a fitting together' or 'the way something is built.' In classical Latin, it referred primarily to physical construction — the structure of a building, the arrangement of stones in a wall. Vitruvius, the Roman architect whose 'De Architectura' is the only surviving Roman treatise on building, used the word frequently.
The word entered English through Old French in the mid-fifteenth century, initially confined to the architectural sense: a structure was a building. The abstract sense — the arrangement of parts in any complex whole — developed gradually during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as natural philosophers and writers extended the building metaphor to non-physical domains. By the eighteenth century, one could speak of the 'structure of society,' the 'structure of an argument,' or the 'structure of a sentence.'
Latin Roots
The twentieth century saw 'structure' become a keyword in multiple intellectual movements. In linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure's structural approach analyzed language as a system of interrelated parts. In anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss developed structuralism as a method for analyzing myths, kinship systems, and cultural practices. In literary criticism, structuralism sought the underlying structures that generate meaning in texts. In all these movements, the Latin building metaphor was applied to abstract systems: language, culture, and narrative were treated as edifices whose architecture could be analyzed.
In computing and programming, 'structure' (often abbreviated 'struct') refers to a composite data type that groups related variables. A 'data structure' is a way of organizing information — an array, a linked list, a tree. The building metaphor is perfectly apt: programmers construct data structures the way architects construct buildings, arranging components into organized wholes.
The PIE root *strew- (to spread, extend) connects 'structure' to a surprising set of English relatives. Through the Germanic branch, *strew- produced Old English 'strēowian' (to strew, scatter), which gives modern 'strew.' It also produced 'straw' (something strewn on the ground) and 'stray' (something that has spread away from where it should be). The Latin branch took the same root in a different direction: instead of spreading flat, 'struere' meant piling up — building by laying things on top of each other. The contrast between 'strew' (to scatter) and 'structure' (to build) illustrates how two branches of the same language family can take a single root in opposite semantic directions.