Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Colon
/ˈkoʊlən/noun
The last major section of the large intestine, running from the caecum to the rectum.
The Greek roots
κόλον
kólon
large intestine
Literally: “the large gut”
Follow a root:κόλον4 words
The story of the word
Two Greek words that look almost identical landed on the same English page. The gut is κόλον. The punctuation mark is κῶλον, limb, the term Greek rhetoricians used for a clause-sized unit of a sentence, with the two dots marking where one ended and the next began. Latin scribes muddled the pair early, and semicolon carries the rhetorical one.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
Same family
colitiscolonoscopycolectomy
In a sentence
The scan showed inflammation along the lower colon.