Euphoria

The story of the word

The word was clinical before it was cheerful. In eighteenth-century English medicine euphoria named a patient's capacity to bear a treatment well, the opposite of dysphoria, and said nothing at all about mood. Nineteenth-century psychiatry pulled it toward elation, and it now names precisely the state doctors once found ominous in the gravely ill.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → Latin → English

First recorded

18th century