tekhnología

Greek tekhnē meant craft or art — the skill of the potter, the shipwright, the physician. It implied trained knowledge applied to making things. The suffix -logia meant systematic account or study. Aristotle distinguished tekhnē from episteme (pure knowledge) and phronesis (practical wisdom): tekhnē was how you made a chair or a tragedy. It was humble, applied, and concrete.

The compound tekhnología appeared in late ancient Greek but remained obscure for centuries. The word entered English through Latin and French in the 17th century, when Francis Bacon and his circle began arguing that systematic study of crafts could transform civilization. Bacon's 1620 Novum Organum imagined a college where artisans and natural philosophers worked side by side — the germ of what became the Royal Society.

The modern sense — technology as the ensemble of machinery, processes, and applied science — crystallized in the 19th century. Jacob Bigelow's 1829 Boston lectures 'Elements of Technology' helped establish the word in American English. By 1861, when MIT opened as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, technology had become synonymous with industrial civilization itself.

In the 20th century the word narrowed toward electronics. 'Technology' now conjures screens and processors, not looms and plows. The Greek tekhnē covered every made thing; modern technology covers one narrow domain. The craft of the cobbler is no longer technology. The algorithm is.