Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Aneurysm
/ˈænjərɪzəm/noun
A bulge in the wall of a blood vessel where the wall has weakened.
The Greek roots
ἀνά
aná
up, throughout
εὐρύς
eurýs
wide, broad
Literally: “a widening out”
The story of the word
ἀνεύρυσμα means simply a widening-out, from εὐρύς, wide, and Greek physicians already used it for a swollen vessel and knew what happened when one gave way. English has spelled it aneurism for centuries by analogy with the crowd of words in -ism, which is an error the dictionaries now mostly correct. The y is there because the second element is εὐρύς, not because anything is being made into a doctrine.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Medieval Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
Same family
anatomyanalysisanachronism
In a sentence
The scan found an aneurysm nobody had suspected.
Most brain aneurysms cause no symptoms at all until they leak.