[ابو بيشو]

نقلت لحضراتكم اسئله الساده المدرسين من خلال موقع Longman
ولكن الظاهر ان حضراتكم لم تلقوا نظره عليه لذا نقلت لحضراتكم الرد شكرا لكم جميعا Tell me please how can I explain the difference between historic and historical.
Sender
ali samir
Position
Student


Please note that students are not required to know the difference between historic and historical. They only need to know that these are adjectives and to distinguish them from the nouns history and historian.

Some dictionaries — including Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online and Merriam-Webster International Online — do not distinguish these two words.

Some other references do distinguish them. The Cambridge Guide to English Usage explains them this way:

"Historic is more self-consciously associated with the making of history, so that a historic event is one which people feel is particularly significant in the life and culture of the nation. Historical is more neutral, acknowledging that something belongs to the past, or to the study of the past, or else that it really happened and is not fictitious."

Let’s look at some examples.
A historical book is a book about history, but a historic book is one that is particularly significant in the culture, perhaps because it was the first of its kind — the first novel, the first book printed rather than copied by hand, the first book to deal with a certain subject, etc.

A historical building is simply an old building. A historic building is considered important because a memorable event happened in or near it — an assassination, the signing of a treaty, the founding of an important organization, etc.

A historical person is one who really existed in the past. Legends are usually fantastic imaginary stories that grow around a historical figure. That is, the person really existed, even though the deeds and events of the legend are imaginary or exaggerated.