photograph [M19th] The original of this was French photographie ‘photography’, first recorded in 1834. The word was apparently introduced to English (along with photographic and photograph) by Sir John Herschel in a paper presented to the Royal Society on 14 March 1839. Both the French and English words were formed from Greek photo- ‘light’ (found in numerous other words) and graphē ‘writing, drawing’, as in autograph [M17th], something written in one’s own hand, from Greek auto ‘by oneself’ and seismograph [M19th] combined with Greek seismos ‘earthquake’. As early as 1860 Queen Victoria was using the short form photo, writing in a letter about someone ‘waiting to know…about the photo’.