More than a tale
In current English a story is an account of events, whether they happened, might have happened, or were invented for the telling. The same noun covers a child’s bedtime narrative, a news report, the plot of a novel, a polite name for a lie, and, in American usage, a horizontal level of a building. The origin of the word story is easy to miss because the form looks short and native. It is a loan, and for a long time it did the work now split between story and history.
A French chronicle word
English borrowed it in the early thirteenth century, around 1200. The immediate sources are Anglo-French storie and estorie, matching Old French estoire, which meant a chronicle or history as much as a narrative. Late Latin already used a shortened storia beside classical historia. Middle English spelled the loan storie or storye.
Those first English uses were not about made-up entertainment. A story was a connected account of important past events and celebrated people, treated as true or at least as the kind of record a chronicle would keep. In the fourteenth century a storier could be a historian, often as a surname. The adjective storial marked material that dealt with the past as fact. A book of story was a history book. A faint version of that older job survives when story means legend or tradition rather than fiction.
The French form lost its opening vowel by aphesis, so estorie became storie. A later, more bookish borrowing kept the Greek-Latin opening. History, from the same Latin historia, is recorded in English from the late fourteenth century. The two nouns are doublets: one word that entered twice, with different shapes and, eventually, different jobs. They were not cleanly divided at first. Through the Middle English period they shared most senses. Only in the sixteenth century did English begin to treat story as the shorter, more flexible telling and history as the disciplined record of the past.
From seeing to inquiry
Latin historia is itself a loan from Ancient Greek historía. In Greek the noun meant learning through investigation, the report of what inquiry had found, and then, by a natural step, a narrative or historical account. It belongs with the verb historeîn, to inquire, give testimony, or recount, and with hístōr, a person who knows: an expert or a witness.
Those Greek forms are usually traced to a Proto-Indo-European root reconstructed as *weid-, to see and therefore to know. The same family appears in Greek ideîn, to see, and eidénai, to know, and in English relatives such as idea, vision, wise, and wit. The chain is not a folk picture of someone watching a tale unfold. It runs from seeing, to knowing, to standing as a witness, to writing down what an investigation produced.
Romance languages stayed closer to the Latin shape: French histoire, Italian storia, Spanish historia, Portuguese história. English is unusual in keeping two everyday descendants of the same learned noun, one with the opening hi- and one without. German Geschichte, often offered as a translation, is not from this root; it is a different word that happens to cover similar ground.
How the senses branched
Once the loan was in English, its range widened. By the late fourteenth century it could mean an account of happenings that were only alleged, not certified as public history. Around 1500 the literary sense of an imaginative tale meant to entertain is in place. A humorous anecdote is recorded by the early fifteenth century. By about 1600, story can mean the facts of a case laid out in sequence. Plot in a novel or play appears by 1715; the compound story-line in that technical sense waits until the 1940s.
Later uses are social as much as literary. From the 1690s, telling a story can be a polite way to say someone is lying. Newspaper English adopted the word for a report or descriptive article by 1892. Whole story for a full account is seventeenth-century. Another story for a separate matter that needs different treatment is nineteenth-century. Story of my life as a wry label for a sad pattern is twentieth-century, modeled on the titles of autobiographies. In Ireland, a clipped greeting story, short for what’s the story, asks how things stand rather than for a narrative. Social apps borrowed the noun again in the 2010s for a short sequence of pictures or clips that disappear after a day.
The building sense is a parallel life of the same Latin noun, not a coincidence of spelling. Around 1400, storie also names the habitable band between one floor and the next. Anglo-Latin already used historia for a floor of a building and for a picture. Medieval English likewise used story for a historical scene in paint, sculpture, or needlework by about 1300. The usual explanation is that the fronts of medieval buildings, especially churches, carried rows of painted windows or narrative friezes, so a horizontal band of the facade was a pictorial story before it was an architectural storey. British English later settled on storey for the floor and kept story for the narrative; American English uses story for both. An older guess that the floor word comes from Old French estorer, to build, is generally set aside, because the architectural meaning is already in Anglo-Latin historia.
The split that stuck
The fact worth keeping is the split itself. Story and history began as one borrowed word. One lost an opening syllable in French and became the name for almost any telling. The other kept the learned shape and became the name for inquiry into the past. When English still needed a word for a painted band of a building, it reached for the same Latin noun a third time. A tale, a discipline, and a floor are three later lives of Greek historía: a report of what someone had gone out to see and find out.