Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Catarrh
/kəˈtɑːr/noun
Inflammation of the mucous membranes of the nose and throat, with heavy mucus.
The Greek roots
κατά
katá
down
ῥέω
rhéō
to flow
Literally: “a flowing down”
The story of the word
Greek medicine took the word literally. A humor was thought to drip down from the brain, through the nose and into the chest, and the name recorded the supposed route. The theory collapsed and the word stayed, propped up for a century by Victorian advertising that sold catarrh cures by the shelf. The same ῥέω runs under rheumatism, diarrhea and hemorrhoid.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 15th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
rheumrheumatismdiarrheahemorrhoid
In a sentence
Three weeks of catarrh and he still insisted it was only a cold.
The old prescription book lists nine remedies for catarrh, all of them useless.