myth

The word myth goes back to Ancient Greek mythos, which first meant speech, word, or utterance. In Homer, around the eighth century BCE, mythos could mean a formal statement or authoritative speech. It did not yet mean a false tale. The later sense grew from the kinds of stories that speech carried.

By the classical period, mythos had come to mean tale, legend, or traditional story, especially one involving gods and heroes. Greek writers set mythos against logos in some contexts, with mythos pointing to inherited narrative and logos to reasoned account. That contrast sharpened in philosophy but never erased the older breadth of mythos. The word still named a story before it named an error.

The form passed into Latin as mythos and then into learned European usage. English took myth in the early nineteenth century, largely through scholarly writing shaped by Latin and French models. The short English form reflects learned borrowing rather than a long popular chain. That is why it looks abruptly classical in modern spelling.

Once in English, myth split into two common senses. One sense kept the older value of sacred or traditional narrative, as in Greek myth. The other sense, common by the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, meant a widely held but false belief. A word for speech became a word for stories people either revere or dispute.