Mind & EmotionGreek → English
Ecstasy
/ˈɛkstəsi/noun
Overwhelming joy, or a trance in which the mind seems to leave the body.
The Greek roots
ἐκ
ek
out of
στάσις
stásis
standing, position
Literally: “standing outside oneself”
The story of the word
ἔκστασις in ordinary Greek is displacement, being knocked out of position, and in the medical writers it means derangement. Religious usage turned it into the soul's departure from the body in vision, and that is the sense the Church carried into Latin. The drug picked up the name in the mid-1980s. Its neighbour στάσις, plain standing, is the Greek political word for civil war: a city standing in two halves.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
staticecstaticapostasysystem
In a sentence
The crowd went from polite attention to something close to ecstasy.
Mystics describe ecstasy in language that keeps failing them.