The word entered English in the late fourteenth century, from French and Latin. It named the breaking apart of a physical substance into its separate elements. Francis Bacon, the philosopher and statesman, used it in his 1626 work Sylua Syluarum to describe the cause of death itself, the moment the body's vital spirits dissolved and were extinguished.
French carried the word into English in the late fourteenth century. French took it from Latin in the thirteenth century. Geoffrey Chaucer used it in 1391, in his Treatise on the Astrolabe, a guide to the astronomical instrument that drew on the work of Messahalla, an eighth-century astronomer from the Islamic world, using it to translate complex ideas into plain English.
Behind the Latin word lay two parts, a prefix, meaning again, or back, and a verb, meaning to loosen, or to untie. Behind that verb lay a Proto-Indo-European root, *leu-, meaning to divide, to cut apart.
DISSOLVE and ABSOLVE share the same Latin root as this word. DISSOLVE entered English in the late fourteenth century, meaning to break a substance apart, to melt it into liquid, and by the fifteenth century had also come to mean disbanding a parliament or an assembly. ABSOLVE entered English in the early fifteenth century, from a Latin verb meaning to set free, especially in a court of law, releasing the accused from guilt so completely that in religious use it came to mean forgiveness.
By the sixteenth century the word had turned toward the mind rather than matter. Shakespeare used it twice in 1594 alone, once in Lucrece, once in Titus Andronicus, each time meaning determination. In 1798 Thomas Jefferson and James Madison each drafted a formal state declaration arguing that states could judge for themselves whether a federal law was constitutional. By 1846 the word had found a new home in literary criticism, naming the point where a story's plot finally comes together and concludes.
