Mind & EmotionGreek → English
Hysteria
/hɪˈstɛriə/noun
Uncontrolled emotion or panic, especially when it spreads through a group.
The Greek roots
ὑστέρα
hystéra
womb
Literally: “of the womb”
Follow a root:ὑστέρα2 words
The story of the word
ὑστέρα is the womb. Hippocratic writers explained a cluster of symptoms in women by claiming the womb wandered around the body pressing on other organs, and the diagnosis outlived the theory by roughly two thousand years. Hysteria itself is modern Latin, assembled around 1801, and psychiatry has since dismantled the category and redistributed its cases. Hysterectomy carries the same root without any of that history.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1801
Same family
hysterectomyhystericalhysteric
In a sentence
The share price fell on rumour, then on hysteria about the rumour.