Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Endemic
/ɛnˈdɛmɪk/adjective
Permanently present in a particular place or population.
The Greek roots
ἐν
en
in, among
δῆμος
dêmos
people, district
Literally: “in the people”
The story of the word
Hippocratic writers separated the diseases that sit permanently in a district from those that arrive and sweep through, and the pair survives in English as endemic and epidemic — one is in the people, the other upon them. English took endemic from French in the 1660s, medical from the start. Biologists later borrowed it for a species found in one place and nowhere else, which is why Australia is described as having endemic mammals rather than endemic measles.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 1660s
Same family
epidemicpandemicdemocracydemagoguedemotic
In a sentence
Malaria is endemic across much of the region.
Nine of the island's plants are endemic and grow nowhere else on earth.