Dysentery

The story of the word

The Hippocratic name says bad guts and claims nothing more, because nothing more could be seen. What it described was bloody diarrhoea, which we now know can be produced by Shigella, by an amoeba, or by several other organisms with different treatments. Armies lost more men to it than to fighting through most of recorded history, and the word entered English in the late fourteenth century with the disease already ancient.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English

First recorded

14th century