2739: What’s the Story with Story? Jun 20, 2024

The word ‘story’ is mostly used to describe some telling of a tale, but it is also used to describe the level of a building, sometimes spelt ‘storey’ in this sense. The use as “personal account” is fairly easy to understand, from the same root as ‘history’, though the meaning has somewhat flipped from the Greek ῐ̔στορέω (historéō) meaning “to inquire/ to ask”, and likewise the noun ἱστορίᾱ (historíā) that became “history” meant, “learning through research”. Like ‘philosophy’, it once had a far more general meaning, but here it began to refer to the description of research as opposed to simply the research by itself. 

When it comes to the story of a building, this is less clear.  This may have had something to do with art depicted in friezes and murals, or as historical objects displayed behind glass panels. From this, it became associated with a set of windows and eventually a level of a house, measured in windows. While it may be tempting to ascribe this to the French ‘estorer’ (to build), the sense of ‘story’ (or really ‘historia’) as building level predates this French word’s introduction to English.