Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Hemophilia
/ˌhiːməˈfɪliə/noun
An inherited disorder in which blood fails to clot properly.
The Greek roots
αἷμα
haîma
blood
φιλία
philía
love, affinity
Literally: “love of blood”
The story of the word
Friedrich Hopff, working under Schönlein at Zurich, published Hämophilie in 1828 for a bleeding tendency that rabbinical and medical texts had been describing for centuries. The name is a poor one and physicians have said so ever since, because φιλία means affection or affinity, so the word promises a fondness for blood rather than an inability to keep it in. The suffix was meant in its weaker sense of a tendency towards something, the same shading that survives in hydrophilic.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → German → English
Same family
hemoglobinhemorrhageanemiaphilosophy
In a sentence
Hemophilia ran through Queen Victoria's descendants into three royal houses.
A single missing clotting factor is enough to cause hemophilia.