Artery
/ˈɑrtəri/noun
A vessel carrying blood away from the heart.
The Greek roots
Literally: “windpipe”
The story of the word
In Greek medicine ἀρτηρία named the windpipe first, and the vessels got the name because they were found empty in dissected bodies and were assumed to carry air. Erasistratus built a whole physiology on that mistake, with pneuma running in the arteries and blood in the veins, and it survived until Galen tied off a living artery and showed blood spurting. The origin of the Greek word itself is unsettled; a link to ἀείρω, to lift or attach, is proposed but not secure. The road sense, a main artery through a city, is nineteenth-century English.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
The surgeon found the artery in under a minute, which is why the boy lived.