Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Diphtheria
/dɪfˈθɪriə/noun
A bacterial infection that grows a tough grey membrane across the throat and can suffocate the patient.
The Greek roots
διφθέρα
diphthéra
prepared hide, leather
Literally: “leather disease”
Follow a root:διφθέρα1 word
The story of the word
Pierre Bretonneau named the disease in the 1820s for the leathery false membrane he found at autopsy, borrowing the Greek word for a worked animal skin. Before papyrus was cheap the Ionians wrote on those skins, and Herodotus reports that they went on calling books διφθέραι long afterwards. English took the name from French in 1857, in time for the epidemics that gave it a reputation as the strangling angel of children.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → French → English
- First recorded
- 1857
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
diphtheritic
In a sentence
Diphtheria came back fast in the 1990s wherever vaccination coverage collapsed.