Historical

How to spell historical

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce historical

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does historical mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to history or to people, events, and things from the past.

Historical in a sentence

• The museum holds a large collection of historical documents.

• She wrote a historical novel set during the reign of Queen Victoria.

Where does historical come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word traces back to the ancient Greek historia, which originally meant 'inquiry' or 'knowledge gained by investigation', and only later came to mean an account of past events. The Greek noun passed into Latin as historicus 'of history', then through Old French into Middle English, where 'history' itself was established by the 1300s. The adjective 'historical' was assembled in English by adding the familiar -ical ending to the Latin stem, and it became common from the 1500s onward. A useful spelling note is that English keeps the second 'i' from the root histor-, so the word is hist-OR-ical rather than the shorter 'historic'; the two co-exist with a fine distinction, 'historic' meaning momentous and 'historical' meaning relating to history. The shared histor- root also sits inside 'prehistoric' and the related verb 'story', since 'story' is itself a worn-down cousin of 'history'.

How the word is built

• histor- (from Greek historia: inquiry, account of events)
• -ical (adjective suffix)