Hormone
/ˈhɔːrmoʊn/noun
A chemical made in one part of the body that travels in the blood and changes how another part behaves.
The Greek roots
Literally: “setting in motion”
The story of the word
Ernest Starling introduced the word in a London lecture in 1905, for secretin, the gut substance he and William Bayliss had identified three years earlier; the Greek was suggested to him by Cambridge colleagues. The participle is active, not passive: a hormone is the thing that urges others on, and Homer uses the verb of a warrior charging a line. Before 1905 there was no general name for chemical messengers, only the observation that removing a gland changed some distant organ.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1905
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
In a sentence
Cortisol is the hormone that gets you out of bed whether you want to be there or not.
The blood test came back showing low thyroid hormone.