Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Arthroscopy
/ɑːrˈθrɒskəpi/noun
Inspection or repair of the inside of a joint through a narrow optical instrument.
The Greek roots
ἄρθρον
árthron
joint, articulation
σκοπεῖν
skopeîn
to look at, examine
Literally: “joint viewing”
The story of the word
Ἄρθρον is a joint, the hinge where two bones are articulated, and Greek grammarians used the same word for the article, the small word that joints a sentence. Kenji Takagi looked inside a living knee with a cystoscope in Tokyo in 1918; his student Masaki Watanabe built the first genuinely practical arthroscope in the 1950s and published an atlas of what he saw. Arthritis is the inflammation of the same joint, from the same root.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 20th century
Same family
arthritisarthropodosteoarthritisendoscope
In a sentence
The arthroscopy found a torn meniscus and tidied it up in the same hour.
He was walking two days after the arthroscopy.