Matter has a spectacular history. The English noun ultimately comes from Latin māteria (also māteriēs ) “timber, wood for building, the woody part of a tree (as opposed to the root or bark).” Māteria is a derivative of māter “mother, source, origin of (material and abstract) things.”
In the first century b.c., the Roman poet and Epicurean philosopher Lucretius and his elder contemporary Cicero, statesman and man of letters, began using māteria in the sense “any substance that makes up a physical object,” also “the basic substance of the physical universe,” a translation of Greek hýlē “timber, firewood, wood for building.” Two hundred years earlier, Aristotle was using hýlē in the extended sense “the basic substance of the physical universe, matter,” prefiguring the Romans.
Māteria maintained its original, pre-Aristotelian sense “wood” in Portuguese, becoming madeira by regular phonetic change. The island of Madeira is so called because it is (or was) thickly wooded, and the fortified wine originating on that island is known as Madeira or Madeira wine (first occurring in English at the end of the 16th century). Some would claim that, more than wood, wine is the basic substance, or stuff, of life.

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