Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Amygdala
/əˈmɪɡdələ/noun
An almond-shaped cluster of nuclei deep in each temporal lobe, central to fear and emotional memory.
The Greek roots
ἀμυγδάλη
amygdálē
almond
Literally: “almond”
Follow a root:ἀμυγδάλη2 words
The story of the word
Karl Friedrich Burdach picked out the structure in the 1820s and named it for its shape, nothing more. The Greek word for the nut was probably itself borrowed from a Semitic language, and it took a second route into English: amygdálē went into Latin as amandula, then Old French almande, and came out as almond. So the part of the brain that panics and the nut in the baklava are the same word twice.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
almondamygdaloid
In a sentence
Scans showed the amygdala lighting up a fraction of a second before he could name what frightened him.