Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Gonorrhea
/ˌɡɑnəˈriə/noun
A bacterial infection of the genital tract caused by Neisseria gonorrhoeae.
The Greek roots
γόνος
gónos
seed, semen
ῥοία
rhoía
a flowing
Literally: “flow of seed”
The story of the word
Galen fixed the name in the second century AD, and he got the disease wrong in the process: he took the discharge for semen leaking involuntarily. The mistake is still sitting in the word every clinician writes. Albert Neisser found the actual bacterium in 1879, which is why the organism carries his name and not Galen's.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
Same family
gonadgenediarrhearheumatism
In a sentence
Resistant gonorrhea has forced three changes of first-line treatment in twenty years.