Day 28 : Origins of “Anecdote”

I just found out yesterday that “Anecdote” is originally a Greek word! 

Its origins were discovered when I showed Konstantinos my blog, and he shared that in Greek there is a word called “anékdotos” which meant “unpublished”, and that there is also recently a second and more modern meaning to this word used in the Greek language to mean “a joke”

Did some googling today and apparently this word, according to Wikipedia, came from Procopius of Caesarea, the biographer of Justinian I, who produced a work entitled Ἀνέκδοτα (Anekdota, variously translated as Unpublished Memoirs or Secret History), which is primarily a collection of short incidents from the private life of the Byzantine court.

The English meaning, on the other hand, took on a slightly different meaning, even though the word origin is Greek – “A short account of an interesting or humorous incident” – befitting for the title of my blog “Anecdotes of a Globetrotter” since the blog posts were suppose to be short and (hopefully) interesting stories and incidents which I encounter each day. 

Just thought that this was quite interesting and found that it is quite apt especially since my 1st stop is Greece!