http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solfege

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Note added at 28 mins (2006-11-11 09:57:29 GMT)
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"Solfege" came from French solfège in the 1910s. (In French, solfège refers to musical technical skills as a whole: sight reading, writing the score of the music one hears, singing in tune, etc.) The French word in turn came from the Italian solfeggio, which is a combination of sol and fa. Its equivalent since Early Modern English is sol-fa.



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Note added at 35 mins (2006-11-11 10:04:34 GMT)
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In music and sight singing solfege or solmization is a way of assigning syllables to degrees or steps of the diatonic scale. In order, they are: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So(l), La, Ti (or Si), and Do (for the octave).

from The Oxford Companion to Music:

"SOLFEGGIO (It.), SOLFEGE (FR.). A type of vocal exercise, properly one in which the names of the notes, sol, fah, etc. are applied throughout - on the continental Fixed-doh system (i.e. G always being sol, F always fah, etc.), not the Tonic Sol-fa system.
The object may be either voice exercise or sight-reading exercise.
The plural of "Solfeggio" is Solfeggi...
Nowadays some confusion is apt to occur between Solfeggio and Vocalise.
Solfège is also sometmies lossely used as almost the equivalent of the English "Rudiments" o "elements" or "Theory" of Music, i.e. the knowledge of notation, intervals, etc.)

Solfe

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Note added at 37 mins (2006-11-11 10:07:02 GMT)
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The Oxford Companion to Music:

SOLMIZATION.
Singing a passage (i.e. reading it at sight) to the sol-fa syllables in any of the varying ways that have been used since Guido d'Arezzo introduced these syllables.