Sport & ContestGreek → English
Endomorph
/ˈɛndəmɔrf/noun
A person of rounded, soft build who gains weight easily and loses it slowly.
The Greek roots
ἔνδον
éndon
within, inside
μορφή
morphḗ
form, shape
Literally: “inner form”
The story of the word
The innermost germ layer, the endoderm, becomes the lining of the gut, so Sheldon in 1940 gave the round build the inward name and tied it to a comfortable temperament. Mineralogists had used endomorph a century earlier for one crystal grown inside another, and that sense quietly died. Fitness writing now treats the three types as fixed categories, which is the one thing Sheldon's own scoring system refused to do.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1940
Same family
ectomorphmesomorphendocrineendoscopy
In a sentence
Calling yourself an endomorph is a poor substitute for reading the training plan.
The magazine sorted its readers into endomorphs and everyone else.