To understand where the word “information” comes from, we have to travel back to ancient Greece and meet Aristotle. He had a theory called Hylomorphism, a way of looking at the world that says every physical object is a combination of two things: matter (hyle) and form (morphe).

Think of a bronze statue. The bronze itself is the matter. But what makes it a statue of a horse and not just a lump of metal? Its form. The form is the shape, the structure, the very essence of its “horseness.” For Aristotle, you could never separate the two. There’s no form without matter, and no matter without form.

This idea of form was central to Aristotle's explanation of how things come to be and why they exist. To truly know something, he argued, you had to understand its four causes. These weren't just about what happened before an event, but a complete explanation of its existence.

The Formal Cause is our main interest. It’s the pattern, the blueprint, the definition of a thing. It’s the structure that matter is organized into. Without the formal cause, the wood would just be a pile of lumber, not a table. The form is what makes it what it is.

Fast forward several centuries. Medieval philosophers, deeply influenced by Aristotle, adopted these ideas. They worked primarily in Latin, and their word for this act of giving form was informatio. This is the direct ancestor of our word “information.”

During the era of Scholasticism, informatio was an active process. It wasn't something passive you could hold or transfer like a file. Information was the act of shaping something—either shaping physical matter or, more importantly, shaping the mind. When you learned something, your intellect was literally being “in-formed” by a concept. The raw data from your senses was the matter, and your mind imposed a form on it, creating understanding.

Think about seeing a tree. According to medieval epistemology, your eyes don't just receive light. They receive the

Your intellect then grasps this form, and you understand

So, the original meaning of information was tied to structure, essence, and the act of becoming knowable. It was a process of organization, not a quantity of data. This philosophical bedrock is a world away from our modern view of information as something to be stored, measured in bytes, and sent across networks. It was about the blueprint, not the bits.