Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Angina
/ænˈdʒaɪnə/noun
Chest pain caused by heart muscle not getting enough blood.
The Greek roots
ἄγχειν
ánchein
to squeeze, strangle
Literally: “a strangling”
Follow a root:ἄγχειν1 word
The story of the word
Latin angina meant a throat that closes, and Greek ἀγχόνη, a strangling, stands behind it or beside it; dictionaries split on whether Latin borrowed the Greek word or built its own from angere, to squeeze, since both go back to the same ancient root. That root also produced anguish, anxiety and anger. William Heberden described the chest pain in 1768 and called it angina pectoris, a strangling of the chest, naming the sensation rather than the cause, which turned out to be narrowed coronary arteries.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
In a sentence
His angina comes on halfway up the hill and stops when he does.
Stable angina and a heart attack feel similar enough that nobody should guess.