Mind & EmotionGreek → English
Kinesthetic
/ˌkɪnəsˈθɛtɪk/adjective
Relating to the body's sense of its own position and movement.
The Greek roots
κίνησις
kínēsis
movement
αἴσθησις
aísthēsis
perception, sensation
Literally: “movement perception”
The story of the word
The neurologist Henry Charlton Bastian coined kinaesthesis in 1880 for the sense that tells you where your arm is with your eyes shut, a sense that had no name and no seat among the traditional five. Physiologists now mostly say proprioception, but the older word survives, largely in talk about kinesthetic learners, a classroom idea with far less evidence behind it than the physiology it borrowed from. αἴσθησις also gives aesthetic and anaesthetic, the second coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1846 for ether: without sensation.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1880
Same family
aestheticanaesthetickineticsynaesthesia
In a sentence
Juggling is kinesthetic learning of the purest kind: nobody has ever read their way to it.