Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Autopsy
/ˈɔːtɑːpsi/noun
An examination of a body after death to establish the cause.
The Greek roots
αὐτός
autós
self
ὄψις
ópsis
sight, seeing
Literally: “seeing for oneself”
The story of the word
αὐτοψία meant seeing a thing yourself rather than trusting someone's report, and the earliest English use in the 1650s carries just that: personal eyewitness. The dissection sense grew out of it, the surgeon confirming a cause of death with his own eyes instead of from the patient's history. Necropsy is the more accurate word, since it names the corpse; autopsy names only the observer.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1650s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
opticbiopsysynopsisautonomy
In a sentence
The autopsy found no water in the lungs, which changed the whole case.