annals

Annals goes back to Latin annales, meaning yearly records. That adjective comes from annus, year, one of the oldest time words in the language of Rome. By the 2nd century BCE, Romans used annales for notices arranged year by year. Time itself supplied the structure.

Roman public memory gave the word prestige. The Annales Maximi recorded notable events under the supervision of the pontifex maximus, and historians later adopted the yearly format for narrative history. Tacitus, writing in the early 2nd century CE, titled one of his great works Annales. The term had become the name of a historical method.

Latin annales passed into French and then into English in the late Middle Ages. English writers used annals for chronicles organized by years and for the record of institutions, kingdoms, and churches. The plural form stayed standard because the idea was a sequence of yearly entries. One year would not make annals.

Modern English still carries that Roman habit of ordering the past in annual sequence. The word can name formal historical records or, more loosely, the remembered history of a place or field. Its tone is learned because its shape still points back to written chronicle. A year turned into a history.