Definition of the word syntax

The word syntax, which refers to the rules governing the structure of sentences in a language, derives from a Greek word συνταξις (sin-taks-eeves), meaning "arrangement" or "placement together." This term was first used in the context of grammar by the 19th-century Greek philologist Nikolas Triandaphyllidis, who assigned the term syntaxis to the study of sentence structure in ancient Greek grammar. Triandaphyllidis' idea was later popularized and popularly adopted by scholars of Latin grammar, where it also became widely used to describe rules governing sentence structure in that language. Now, the term syntax is commonly used in numerous linguistic fields, including computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and historical linguistics, to signify the study of sentence structure and its relationship to the broader patterns of a given language or language family.