Historian

How to spell historian

9 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce historian

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does historian mean?

1. nounA person who studies, writes about, or is an expert on the past.

Historian in a sentence

• The historian spent years in the archive verifying old letters.

• As a respected historian, she was asked to review the textbook on the war.

Where does historian come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word traces back to the Greek historia, which literally meant 'inquiry' or 'knowledge gained by investigation', and beyond that to histor, meaning 'a learned or wise person, one who knows'. The Greeks used historia for the act of finding things out and then for the written account that resulted, which is why it also gave us the plain word 'history'. Latin took it over as historia, and Old French passed it along as historien, from which English borrowed 'historian' in the late 1400s to mean a writer or scholar of the past. The 'ia' sequence carried over from that Greek and Latin root is the same one that survives in 'history' itself, and remembering the link to 'history' is the easiest way to keep the spelling steady. A useful relative sharing the root is the word 'story', which slipped in through the same family and lost the opening syllable along the way.

How the word is built

• histor- (from Greek historia: inquiry, knowledge)
• -ian (one who practises or specialises)