Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Colonoscopy
/ˌkoʊləˈnɒskəpi/noun
Examination of the large intestine using a flexible camera passed through the rectum.
The Greek roots
κόλον
kólon
large intestine
σκοπεῖν
skopeîn
to look at, examine
Literally: “looking at the colon”
The story of the word
Two different Greek words reach English spelled colon. The gut is κόλον; the punctuation mark is κῶλον, a limb, and by extension a clause of a sentence, which is what the mark originally separated. Only the first is involved here. The procedure became routine after fibreoptic instruments arrived in the 1960s, and it is the reason bowel cancer is now often caught as a polyp instead.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 20th century
Same family
coloncolitisendoscopycolic
In a sentence
He complained about the preparation far more than about the colonoscopy itself.