Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Hemorrhage
/ˈhɛmərɪdʒ/noun
Heavy or uncontrolled bleeding, internal or external.
The Greek roots
αἷμα
haîma
blood
ῥήγνυμι
rhḗgnymi
to burst, break
Literally: “a bursting of blood”
The story of the word
The second element is burst, not flow, and the difference is the whole picture: the Greek sees a vessel giving way rather than a stream running. That is why the medical suffixes split into two families, -rrhage from ῥήγνυμι for something that ruptures and -rrhoea from ῥέω for something that runs, as in diarrhoea. Hippocratic writers used αἱμορραγία in almost the modern sense, and it is one of the oldest unchanged words in clinical English.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
hematomaanemiahemoglobinhemophiliadiarrhoea
In a sentence
A small hemorrhage behind the eye showed up on the scan and explained the headaches.