Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Chyle
/kaɪl/noun
The milky fluid of fat and lymph absorbed from the intestine after a meal.
The Greek roots
χυλός
chȳlós
juice
χεῖν
cheîn
to pour
Literally: “juice”
The story of the word
Greek had two near-synonyms for juice, χυλός and χυμός, and medicine put them to work as a pair: chyme is the porridge leaving the stomach, chyle the milky liquid the gut hands to the lymph vessels. Aselli saw the lacteals in a well-fed dog in 1622, white threads across the mesentery that vanish in a fasting animal, which is why nobody had noticed them before. The other word, χυμός, went into Latin as humor and gave the four humours of ancient medicine.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 15th century
Same family
chymehumour
In a sentence
A damaged thoracic duct leaks chyle into the chest.
Fat leaves the intestine as chyle rather than going straight into the blood.