Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Endoscopy
/ɛnˈdɒskəpi/noun
Examination of the inside of the body with an instrument passed through a natural opening or small incision.
The Greek roots
ἔνδον
éndon
within, inside
σκοπεῖν
skopeîn
to look at, examine
Literally: “looking inside”
The story of the word
Antonin Jean Desormeaux built a lamp-and-mirror instrument in the 1850s and called it an endoscope, decades before fibre optics made the idea bearable for the patient. The verb σκοπεῖν, to look at, is the same one under telescope and microscope. It also produced ἐπίσκοπος, an overseer, which travelled through Latin and Old English to become bishop.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
colonoscopytelescopemicroscopebishop
In a sentence
The endoscopy took twenty minutes and settled a question two scans had left open.