What is a polyhistor?

Yesterday, I mentioned the polyhistor. Polyhistor as an English word is synonymous with, but older than, polymath. The Oxford English Dictionary defines polyhistor as simply, “A person of great or varied learning; a great scholar,” and lists the first use back in the 16^th century. It derives from the Latin and Greek word “very learned” or “much learning,” using a different Greek word for learning, i.e., the word that became the modern “history.”

Its first appearance in English, according to the OED, was in a letter written by a lecturer at the University of Cambrdge named Gabriel Harvey to a fellow Cantabridgian in which he inserted the Greek word πολυϊστωρ (polyhistor) into a sentence otherwise written completely in English. The letter was written generally in English, but did contain a number of Greek and Latin phrases. The letter did not appear in print until 1884, when a collection called Letter-Book of Gabriel Harvey, A.D.1573-1580, was published. So, it is difficult to think that Harvey really intended πολυϊστωρ in a private letter to be viewed by posterity almost half a millennium later as an English word.

However, the next recorded use of the word is far more legitimate. Just a couple of years later, in 1588, Gabriel’s brother, the physician and astrologer John Harvey, used the word (which he spelled polyhistor) in a book called A discoursive probleme concerning prophesies.

No one will ever know, but one can assume that, at some point, the brothers talked or shared their correspondence, and then John used polyhistor as well, but in English.

Samuel Johnson did not put polyhistor in his dictionary (although he did put polymath in there). Polyhistor is now used only rarely as an English word.