Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Carpus
/ˈkɑːrpəs/noun
The eight small bones between the forearm and the hand.
The Greek roots
καρπός
karpós
wrist
Literally: “wrist”
Follow a root:καρπός3 words
The story of the word
Greek καρπός, wrist, and a warning about lookalikes: the identical καρπός meaning fruit is a separate word, and it is the one inside pericarp and mesocarp. The eight carpal bones sit in two rows, and the tunnel they form with a ligament stretched across the top is the passage that gets crowded in carpal tunnel syndrome. Anatomy borrowed the wrist word in the 17th century and gave it a Latin ending.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
Same family
carpalmetacarpuscarpometacarpal
In a sentence
The scaphoid is the carpal bone that breaks when someone falls on an outstretched hand.
Radiographs of the carpus need more than one view to be worth taking.