Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Coma
/ˈkoʊmə/noun
Prolonged unconsciousness from which a person cannot be roused.
The Greek roots
κῶμα
kôma
deep sleep, lethargy
Literally: “deep sleep”
Follow a root:κῶμα1 word
The story of the word
Homer uses κῶμα for the heavy sleep a god pours over a hero, and Hippocratic writers already had it for pathological drowsiness. English took it as a medical term in the 1640s. A second coma exists in astronomy and botany, the cloud around a comet's nucleus and the tuft of hairs on a seed, and that one is a different Greek word, κόμη, hair of the head, which also makes a comet a long-haired star.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1640s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
In a sentence
He was in a coma for nine days and remembers none of it.
The team keeps her in an induced coma while the swelling drops.