history [ME] History goes back to a very ancient root that is also the source of Latin videre ‘to see’ (see view) and of the Old English word wit ‘to have knowledge’. More immediately it came from Greek historia ‘finding out, narrative, history’. In its earliest use in English a history was not necessarily assumed to be true: it could be any narrative or story, an idea echoed by the American motor manufacturer Henry Ford (1863–1947) when he said ‘History is more or less bunk’ in 1916. To make history, ‘to do something that influences the course of history’, dates from the mid 19th century. A less positive view of history appears in the phrase to be history, ‘to be dead or no longer relevant to the present’, which is recorded from the 1930s.