history

Webster's Dictionary (1913)

Origin: L. historia, Gr. ἰστορία history, information, inquiry, fr. ἰστωρ, ἱστωρ, knowing, learned, from the root of … to know; akin to E. wit. See Wit, and cf. Story.

1. A learning or knowing by inquiry; the knowledge of facts and events, so obtained; hence, a formal statement of such information; a narrative; a description; a written record; as, the history of a patient's case; the history of a legislative bill.

2. A systematic, written account of events, particularly of those affecting a nation, institution, science, or art, and usually connected with a philosophical explanation of their causes; a true story, as distinguished from a romance; — distinguished also from annals, which relate simply the facts and events of each year, in strict chronological order; from biography, which is the record of an individual's life; and from memoir, which is history composed from personal experience, observation, and memory.

Histories are as perfect as the historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.— Thomas Carlyle

For aught that I could ever read, Could ever hear by tale or history.— William Shakespeare

What histories of toil could I declare!— Alexander Pope

History piece, a representation in painting, drawing, etc., of any real event, including the actors and the action. — Natural history, a description and classification of objects in nature, as minerals, plants, animals, etc., and the phenomena which they exhibit to the senses.

Synonyms: Chronicle; annals; relation; narration. — History, Chronicle, Annals. History is a methodical record of important events which concern a community of men, usually so arranged as to show the connection of causes and effects, to give an analysis of motive and action etc. A chronicle is a record of such events, conforming to the order of time as its distinctive feature. Annals are a chronicle divided up into separate years. By poetic license annals is sometimes used for history.

Justly Cæsar scorns the poet's lays; It is to history he trusts for praise.— Alexander Pope

No more yet of this; For 't is a chronicle of day by day, Not a relation for a breakfast.— William Shakespeare

Many glorious examples in the annals of our religion.— Rogers

To narrate or record. obsolete William Shakespeare

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), from GCIDE 0.54

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

1.<history> Virginia Tech history of computing (http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/index.html). IT Rentals computing timeline (http://www.itrentals.com/historyofcomputing/).

2.<operating system> A record of previous user inputs (e.g. to a command interpreter) which can be re-entered without re-typing them. The major improvement of the C shell (csh) over the Bourne shell (sh) was the addition of a command history. This was still inferior to the history mechanism on VMS which allowed you to recall previous commands as the current input line. You could then edit the command using cursor motion, insert and delete. These sort of history editing facilities are available under tcsh and GNU Emacs.

3.The history of the world was once discussed in Usenet newsgroups news:soc.history and news:alt.history.

(2013-08-04)

The Devil's Dictionary

Of Roman history, great Niebuhr's shown 'Tis nine-tenths lying. Faith, I wish 'twere known, Ere we accept great Niebuhr as a guide, Wherein he blundered and how much he lied. Salder Bupp