Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Colitis
/kəˈlaɪtɪs/noun
Inflammation of the lining of the colon.
The Greek roots
κόλον
kólon
large intestine
-ῖτις
-îtis
inflammation of
Literally: “large-intestine inflammation”
The story of the word
English has two colons and they were never the same word. κόλον, with a short o, is the gut; κῶλον, with a long one, is a limb and then a clause of a sentence, which is where the punctuation mark comes from. Greek and Latin scribes muddled the spellings early, so the confusion is inherited rather than modern. Ulcerative colitis was distinguished as a specific disease in London in the 1850s.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
coloncolonoscopynephritiscolic
In a sentence
The colitis flared every time exam season came round.
Colonoscopy showed inflammation confined to the left colon.