English speakers now use biography for two closely related things: a written, filmed, or spoken account of one person's life, and the craft or shelf of such accounts as a group. A thinner third sense treats the word as a life-history of almost anything that has lasted long enough to have one, a building, a coin, even a species. Everyday use leans on the first meaning. The origin of the word biography is unusually easy to see once the Greek pieces are named, but the route into English is later, and a little messier, than the look of the noun suggests.
A learned word, not an old native one
The English noun is not inherited from Old English. It is a scholarly borrowing, taken from New Latin biographia, a form older notes sometimes call Medieval Latin. That Latin restates a late Greek compound meaning a description of a life. Classical Greek did not use the compound. A life story could simply be called a bios, the ordinary word for a life or a way of living. The two-part label belongs to later Greek. Historical lexicons often point to the philosopher Damascius, writing around the year 500, as an early source for the Greek noun.
English authorities do not agree on the first print date. The Oxford English Dictionary places the noun in 1661, in writing by John Fell, bishop of Oxford, in a life of the historian Thomas Fuller. Merriam-Webster gives 1665. Other surveys still highlight John Dryden in 1683, in his life of Plutarch, where he sets the Latin form beside English biography and treats the whole as a branch of history concerned with particular men's lives. The spread of those dates is real: the mid-to-late 1600s is secure, a single first year is not. Nearby forms show the same learned fashion. Fuller was already being called a biographist in 1662. Biographer follows in the early eighteenth century, with Joseph Addison often named for 1715. Biographical is later still.
School etymologies sometimes add French biographie as an equal source. That formula is convenient and not wholly false as a later parallel, but it is a poor account of how English got the word. French biographie is recorded clearly in 1755, with a disputed 1721 appearance that may be a mix-up with biographe. English print is older. The safer statement is that English adapted the Latin, while French later made the same Greek-Latin material into its own noun.
The practice of writing lives is far older than any of these labels. Plutarch, Suetonius, medieval saints' lives, and Tudor chronicles all did the work without needing this English word. What arrived in the seventeenth century was a compact name for a kind of history, not the invention of the kind itself.
Life, then writing
The morphology is genuine, not a folk story. The first half is Greek bios, life, more precisely a life as lived: a span, a manner, a livelihood. Greek kept another word, zoe, for animal or organic life. That contrast still matters for English compounds. Biography keeps the older, personal sense of the prefix. From about 1800, scientific English stretched the same bio- toward organic life in general, which is why biology and biography share a face but not quite the same Greek usage. Both bios and zoe go back to a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root meaning to live, the same family that gives Latin vita and the old English sense of quick as alive.
The second half is graphia, writing, record, account, from the verb meaning to write. English -graphy is the regular outcome in dozens of learned nouns: geography, calligraphy, historiography. In this word the two halves still mean what they look like: a written record of a life.
Related modern forms are easy to list because the compound travelled as a European learned word, not as a folk borrowing. French has biographie, German Biographie, Italian biografia, Spanish biografía, and Modern Greek still uses the same Greek noun. English also built on the base already in hand: biographer, biographical, and later autobiography, which simply prefixes self to the English noun rather than inventing a new root.
From a branch of history to a book about one person
The earliest English uses treat biography as a department of history: the writing of lives as a class, set beside chronicles and general narrative. Dryden, following an older division of historical writing associated with Francis Bacon, treats it as narrower than public history and, in his view, less grand, because it stays with one person's fortune. That genre sense is still alive whenever someone says they work in biography, meaning the field rather than a single title.
The countable sense, a book or film about one named person, is the meaning most readers meet first. Some etymological notes date that individual-object sense only from 1791. Literary historians push it earlier, arguing that mid-seventeenth-century lives already used the word for one person's story. There is no need to pick a winner. What is clear is that the class-name came into English as a technical term, and the everyday object-name grew from it rather than the other way around.
By the mid-nineteenth century the word could be stretched off the human subject. An account of an animal, a city, or an institution could be called its biography. Dictionaries still record that extension, though it is more a writer's flourish than the default.
English never settled on a one-word verb. Writers tried biographize around 1800, biography as a verb in the 1840s, and biograph a few years later. None became ordinary. We still write a biography; we biographize only as a joke. The noun won. The verb did not.
What the older half still marks
The useful residue is the Greek distinction hiding inside a familiar English word. In its first half, biography is not a record of organic life. It is a record of a lived course. That is why a two-page conference bio and a three-volume life of a statesman can share a name without sharing a scale: both claim to set down a bios, a way a person went through time, in writing. The seventeenth-century coinage simply gave that old task a shelf label, and the label stuck.