Plenty of stories - like the story of a person’s life or a “true story” on which a less-true film is based - are supposed to be factual. The distinction is still messier than that, of course. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. That word refers to all time preceding this very moment and everything that really happened up to now.įor your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Histories, on the other hand, are records of events. That word can even be used to describe an outright lie. Stories are fanciful tales woven at bedtime, the plots of melodramatic soap operas. “That working out of distinction,” says Durkin, “has taken centuries and centuries.” Today, we might think of the dividing line as the one between fact and fiction. The words story and history share much of their lineage, and in previous eras, the overlap between them was much messier than it is today. And from there it’s a short jump to the accounts of events that a person might put together from making inquiries - what we might call stories.
The Greek word historia originally meant inquiry, the act of seeking knowledge, as well as the knowledge that results from inquiry. The short version is that the term history has evolved from an ancient Greek verb that means “to know,” says the Oxford English Dictionary’s Philip Durkin.
