Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Axon
/ˈæksɒn/noun
The long fibre that carries a nerve cell's signal away from the cell body.
The Greek roots
ἄξων
áxōn
axle, axis
Literally: “axle”
Follow a root:ἄξων1 word
The story of the word
This is the everyday Greek word for a cart's axle, borrowed by anatomists for the straight shaft running out of a neuron while the dendrites branch at the other end. German microscopists first called it the Achsenzylinder, the axis cylinder, and the short form won by the end of the century. Some axons are absurdly long for single cells: in a giraffe, one nerve fibre can run more than two metres without a break.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
axisaxialaxoneme
In a sentence
Myelin wraps the axon in a fatty sheath so the signal jumps rather than crawls.