The origin of the word history is not a split of his and story, though English spelling makes that joke almost inevitable. In present-day use the noun covers several related things at once. It can mean the past as a whole, or the thinner slice of the past that writing and other records let us discuss with some confidence. It can mean a narrative of what happened, a university subject, a medical file, a log of browser visits, or, in slang, a person or episode that is finished. Those later senses grew by metaphor from an older idea of a record. The core remains an account of events, or the events themselves.
A late medieval loan
English did not inherit the noun from Old English. It arrived in the late fourteenth century as Middle English historie or histoire, taken from Anglo-French and Old French estoire, estorie, and historie. Modern French keeps histoire. Behind those French forms stands Latin historia, already a word for a narrative of past events, an account, or a tale.
Reference works do not draw the last mile in exactly the same way. Some present a straight French path sitting on Latin. Others treat the English noun as a double intake, partly from French narrative and partly from school Latin, which is a common pattern for learned vocabulary in late medieval England. Either route lands in the same place: a Romance loan, not a native Germanic inheritance. Educated Middle English has the word by the 1390s.
Inquiry before chronicle
Latin had taken historia from Greek historía. In Greek the noun did not begin as a label for everything that had already happened. It named inquiry: the work of finding out by asking and looking, the knowledge that work produced, and then a written report of the investigation. Classical writers could still hear that older sense. Herodotus used the Ionic form for the inquiries he had made; later readers treated the same stem as a title for a narrative of the past. Modern historians still echo the Greek starting point when they call a book a history and mean a researched account rather than the past itself.
The Greek noun is built on the verb historéō, to inquire, examine, or record, and on hístōr, a knowing person, an expert, a witness. The initial h in English, and in the usual classical transcription, reflects Greek rough breathing, not the English possessive his. The Greek abstract is grammatically feminine; that fact has no bearing on later English jokes about gender in the spelling.
Ionic science and philosophy helped carry the noun and its verb across the Greek-speaking world. From there it was available to Latin, and from Latin to the medieval West.
Seeing, then knowing
The Greek family is reconstructed from a Proto-Indo-European root *weid- or *weyd-, meaning to see and, by a shift found in several daughter languages, to know. An agent form behind hístōr has been reconstructed along the lines of *wid-tor-. Related Greek verbs include idein, to see, and eidenai, to know; idea belongs to the same cluster. Distant English cousins include wit, wise, and vision. Latin video, I see, later gave English video. Sanskrit Veda, knowledge, sits on the same root. None of these words look like history on the surface, which is why the Greek path has to be traced rather than guessed from modern spelling.
Cognates of the borrowed noun itself are easy to spot across Europe: French histoire, Spanish historia, Italian storia, Portuguese história, German Historie beside the native Geschichte, Russian история. English also has a doublet. Story, and the British architectural spelling storey, come from the same French and Latin line, shortened in a way that dropped the hi- of history. The two English words were not always distinct.
When story and history pulled apart
Middle English could use historie for a relation of incidents whether those incidents were taken as true or not. Story covered much of the same ground. A storier could be a historian. Only in the sixteenth century did English speakers start to sort the pair, with history moving toward a record of past events and story remaining available for tale, plot, and, later, something that might be invented. The split took centuries and is still incomplete. A life story is expected to be factual. A history is still a narrative, not a pile of uninterpreted dates. Plenty of stories claim truth, and plenty of histories carry a point of view.
Another older sense survives in a set phrase. From the sixteenth century, history could mean a systematic account of a class of natural facts, without a timeline of human politics. Natural history keeps that use. Most other systematic-survey senses of the bare noun have faded.
Later English added specialized records: a patient’s history in medicine, a credit or employment history, then the computing sense of a log of previous actions. Informal speech turned the noun into a verdict — you are history — meaning finished, no longer in play. In the 1970s, herstory appeared as a feminist coinage. It is a deliberate play on the English pronoun his, not a recovery of an older etymology. The his in history is not the possessive. People who pointed that out were describing the word’s actual pedigree, even if the coinage was meant as commentary on who gets written into the record.
A leftover from the Greek
The useful leftover is the Greek starting point. Before the noun named the past, it named looking into things. English borrowed a medieval French and Latin story-word, then spent centuries teaching it to mean documented time, academic study, and personal background. The spelling still tempts a folk split into his and story. The older Greek stem points somewhere else: a witness who has seen, and therefore claims to know.