The word entered English in the early fifteenth century, borrowed from Latin, which had taken it from Greek. Its earliest English sense was formal and legal. Thomas More used it in 1533 in a text justifying his conduct as Lord Chancellor of England. The Greek original carried a meaning more precise than any of the word's modern uses.
It came into English from Latin, which had taken it from Greek. Jerome, the fourth-century scholar who translated the Old Testament from Hebrew and the New Testament from Greek into Latin, used it in texts defending the Christian faith against its critics. It passed through centuries of theological argument before it reached English. By the time Thomas More used it in 1533 the word had been used for over a thousand years.
The Greek word was built from two elements. The first meant away from. The second was the Greek word for speech, the same root that gives English the idea of rational argument. Together they named something precise, a speech that moves away from an accusation, a reasoned response that turns criticism aside. The word carried that precision into Latin and then into English.
The Greek root for speech runs through several familiar English words. EULOGY comes from the same source, the Greek for speaking well of someone. PROLOGUE comes from it too, the speech that comes before. This word takes the same root in a different direction.
In 399 BC Socrates stood trial in Athens, accused of disrespecting the gods of the city and corrupting the young. His defence, recorded by Plato, was a brilliant and combative argument for everything he had ever done. For its first centuries in English the word carried that same combative spirit. Samuel Johnson, writing his Dictionary in 1755, noticed the change already underway. The word, he observed, had begun to mean excuse rather than vindication, playing down the fault rather than proving innocence. By the eighteenth century the shift was complete.
