Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Asphyxia
/æsˈfɪksiə/noun
A state in which the body is deprived of oxygen, from suffocation, drowning or obstruction.
The Greek roots
ἀ-
a-
without
σφύξις
sphýxis
pulse, throbbing
Literally: “without a pulse”
The story of the word
Read literally the word means no pulse, and that is what Greek medicine used it for, σφύξις being the throb of an artery under the finger. Eighteenth-century physicians applied it to the drowned and the suffocated because a missing pulse was the sign they could find, and the meaning then slid from the sign to the cause. The old sense survives in the sphygmomanometer, the pulse-measurer wrapped round your arm at every check-up.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 18th century
Same family
asphyxiatesphygmomanometer
In a sentence
The report gave asphyxia as the cause of death and left the rest to the inquest.