linguistics
lin·guis·tics
noun
1.
the scientific study of language
2.
the humanistic study of language and literature
Origin
From linguist + -ics, akin to linguistic and Latin linguisticus, coined by English philosopher and historian of science William Whewell in 1847 from German Linguistik.
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WordNet 2.1 (Princeton University). Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. WordNet 2.1 Copyright Princeton University. All rights reserved. Wiktionary content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence.