Biology - its etymology comes from two Greek words as you said, Roo: ???? (bios), which means
life, and ????? (logos), which has lots of meanings, including
- Anything written or spoken
- Reason (for doing something) or argument
- Measure, proportion, ratio
- General principle or rule
- (faculty of) Reason
And that's not even mentioning the special meaning which
????‚ has in Christian or Stoic writings, where it is a Word that is a manifestation of God.
In this context (with 'bios'), it's best understood as meaning 'study of', or perhaps even better, 'account of'. Heraclitus used ????? in this sense (in my opinion).
The term BIOLOGY first appeared in 1766 and was probably coined by Michael Christoph Hanov (used in the title of Volume 3 of
Philosophiae naturalis sive physicae dogmaticae: Geologia, biologia, phytologia generalis et dendrologia). But he didn't seem to have used the word in the same sense as it's used today; for that, you need to turn to Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, if you have nothing else you'd prefer to do...
SHORT ANSWER - bios (life) + logos (word, account, study, discourse) = study of life.
LONG ANSWER - coming in a five-part miniseries.