Amnesia

The story of the word

Amnesty is the same word in different clothes. Athens declared an ἀμνηστία in 403 BC after the fall of the Thirty Tyrants, an official agreement not to remember what had been done, enforced by law. Medicine picked up the ἀμνησία form in the late eighteenth century for memory that had gone rather than memory that was forbidden. The mythic version is the river Lethe, named from λήθη, also forgetting.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → Latin → English

First recorded

18th century