What the word does now
Ask for the origin of the word information and many people will point at computers. In ordinary English the noun names facts that can be told, stored, or looked up: what is known about a subject, news of an event, the contents of a record. Dictionaries still keep a narrower legal sense as well. An information can be a formal charge laid by a prosecutor rather than by a grand jury. The shared idea is simple: something has been given a usable shape so that another person, or another system, can take it in.
How English got the noun
English did not inherit this word from Old English. It arrived in the late fourteenth century as Middle English informacion, also written enformacioun and informacioun, taken from Anglo-Norman and Old French informacion and enformacion. Those French forms meant advice and instruction. Behind them stands Latin informatio, cited in the accusative informationem: an outline, a concept, an idea, the action-noun from the verb informare.
Major historical dictionaries do not treat the path as a single clean borrowing. The Oxford English Dictionary describes the English noun as having more than one source at once: partly the French word, partly the Latin one. In both French and English the noun also stayed close to the related verb, so some uses may have been built from inform rather than imported ready-made. The earliest English evidence is from before 1387, in the translation work of John Trevisa. The spelling we now write, with a restored Latin f and a medial a, settled in the sixteenth century, after a stretch when enform- and inform- competed, as they did with the verb.
There is a small disagreement about which sense came first in English. One standard etymology starts from the act of informing, the communication of news. Commentary based on the OED stresses an early legal load instead: accusatory or incriminating intelligence against a person, taken over from Anglo-Norman practice. Both strains are real in the late Middle Ages. What changed later is which one dominated everyday speech.
Putting something into form
The Latin verb informare is easy to take apart. The prefix in- here means into. Formare means to form or shape and comes from forma, form. Together they mean to put into form: to mould, to outline, to give contour. From that physical sense Latin developed the figurative ones that matter for English: to train, instruct, and educate. Classical authors could also use the verb for sketching an idea in the mind. The noun informatio is that action turned into a thing. In Late Latin it covers teaching and instruction; in medieval Latin, including British sources from the twelfth century, it can mean formation, creation, or arrangement; from the mid-thirteenth century it is common in philosophy for the infusion of form into matter.
The deeper history of forma itself is not settled. Etymologists mark the Latin noun as of unknown origin. One theory links it to Greek morphe, form or outward appearance, perhaps by way of Etruscan; other accounts leave the word outside a secure Indo-European etymology. That uncertainty belongs to forma, not to the later English noun, which is morphologically plain: information is inform plus the suffix -ation, the usual English outcome of Latin -tio.
Romance cognates show the same route at roughly the same time: French information, Catalan informació from 1377, Spanish información and Portuguese informação in the fourteenth century, Italian informazione from around 1430. The English verb inform is slightly older than the noun. It is recorded in the early fourteenth century as enfourmen, from Old French informer, enformer and from Latin informare, first as train or instruct in a subject. Reporting facts or news is recorded by the late fourteenth century. The older enform spelling of both verb and noun lasted until about 1600.
From charge and lesson to content and signal
Early English uses sit closer to an act than to a pile of facts. Late in the fourteenth century the noun could mean the act of informing. Anglo-Norman had already used related forms for a judicial investigation in a criminal matter, and English kept a sharp legal sense: passing incriminating knowledge to an authority, later a formal statement of an offence brought before a magistrate. That accusatory use faded from ordinary speech between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, though it survives in the countable legal term and in darker relatives such as informant and informer.
By the mid-fifteenth century the centre of gravity had moved toward knowledge communicated about a particular topic: not only the telling, but the content told. A rarer philosophical thread, the imparting of form or a formative quality, is still attested from the seventeenth century. Systematic teaching, education as the giving of form to a mind, is another older sense that has grown rare.
The word then began to pick up institutional company. The earliest compound noted in the OED, information office, dates from 1782 and first named a service for British colonists arriving in India. Nineteenth-century formations such as information-seeking, information bureau, and information officer treat knowledge as something that can be gathered, staffed, and supplied. Information became a managed commodity long before it became a unit in a formula.
The twentieth century stretched the noun into media, biology, and machines. Writers used it of television broadcast signals from 1937, of punch-card systems from 1944, and of DNA from 1953. Information theory dates from 1950; information technology, coined in the Harvard Business Review, from 1958; information revolution, tied to computing, from 1966; information overload from 1967. In that technical frame the word can mean a reduction of uncertainty, a bit, or an ordered sequence of symbols that might carry a message. The legal and pedagogical senses did not vanish; they were simply outnumbered.
A countable leftover
A small fossil of the legal beginning is still easy to miss. In ordinary talk we treat information as uncountable stuff. In court it can still be an information: one document, one charge. That countable use is not a quirk of computer English. It is the older accusatory sense, still doing legal work. The Latin verb underneath, to put into form, also explains why the same word could cover teaching a pupil, filing a charge, and encoding a signal. Each is a way of giving shape so that something can be received.