Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Diagnostic
/ˌdaɪəɡˈnɒstɪk/adjective
Serving to identify what is wrong, or a test that does so.
The Greek roots
διά
diá
through, apart
γιγνώσκειν
gignṓskein
to know, recognise
Literally: “able to tell apart”
The story of the word
διαγιγνώσκειν is to know one thing apart from another. Hippocratic writers used the noun for the skill of separating one disease from another at the bedside, which was most of medicine when treatment had little to offer. English borrowed the adjective in the 1620s for a sign that distinguishes, and engineers took it in the twentieth century, so a car now runs diagnostics on itself while the word means what it always meant.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1620s
Same family
diagnosisprognosisgnosticagnostic
In a sentence
The rash is diagnostic; nothing else looks like it.
Plug in the reader and pull the diagnostic codes.