Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Esophagus
/ɪˈsɒfəɡəs/noun
The muscular tube carrying swallowed food from the throat to the stomach.
The Greek roots
οἴσω
oísō
I shall carry
φαγεῖν
phageîn
to eat
Literally: “what will carry the eaten”
The story of the word
The Greek compound is odd in being built on a future tense: the thing that is going to carry what has been eaten. British spelling keeps the Greek diphthong as oesophagus and American drops it, the same split that gives fetus and estrogen. φαγεῖν also builds sarcophagus, flesh-eating, named for a limestone quarried at Assos that was believed to consume a body in forty days.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Medieval Latin → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
sarcophagusphagocytebacteriophage
In a sentence
The camera goes down the esophagus and the whole thing takes ten minutes.
Acid had scarred the lower esophagus.