Nineteenth-century philology treated each new word as an evolutionary event for humanity.

Evidence

Language was to be thought of as an organism, evolving in accordance with natural historical laws. Its cells were formed of individual words, each of which was an entity with a plenitude of meaning whose development could be traced back to an etymological origin. In the birth of individual words and the stages of their growth could be discovered the stages of evolution of the human mind. ‘Every new word’, it was claimed at the inauguration of the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists, ‘represents really a most momentous event in the development of our race.’ — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 439

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: how the ‘language as organism’ metaphor naturalized a hierarchy of races—fitting philology into Mitchell’s colonial-epistemology chapter.