Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Collagen
/ˈkɑːlədʒən/noun
The fibrous protein that gives skin, tendon, cartilage and bone their tensile strength.
The Greek roots
κόλλα
kólla
glue
-γενής
-genḗs
producing, born of
Literally: “glue-producer”
The story of the word
Named in the 1860s because boiling it yields gelatine, and animal glue has been rendered from hides and hooves that way for thousands of years. It is the most abundant protein in the body: three chains wound into a rope that resists being pulled apart. The same κόλλα is in collage and in protocol, which was the sheet glued to the front of a papyrus roll to declare what was inside.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1860s
Same family
collageprotocolcolloid
In a sentence
Slow cooking turns the collagen in a shin of beef into gelatine, which is why it goes sticky.