Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Diastole
/daɪˈæstəli/noun
The phase in which the heart muscle relaxes and the chambers fill with blood.
The Greek roots
διά
diá
apart, through
στέλλειν
stéllein
to send, set
Literally: “a drawing apart”
The story of the word
Greek grammarians used διαστολή for a mark that separates words, and rhetoricians for a pause. Physicians took it for the expansion of the arteries under the pulse, long before anyone understood that the heart was pumping. The lower number in a blood pressure reading is the pressure left in the arteries during this relaxed phase.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1570s
Same family
systoleapostleepistleperistalsis
In a sentence
The scan measures how well the ventricle fills during diastole.