Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Mechanism
/ˈmɛkənɪzəm/noun
A system of moving parts that performs a function, or the way a process actually works.
The Greek roots
μηχανή
mēkhanḗ
device, contrivance
Literally: “a contrivance”
Follow a root:μηχανή5 words
The story of the word
Seventeenth-century natural philosophy pushed the word past gadgets: to explain something by its mechanism was to claim it worked by matter in motion and nothing else, which made mechanism a fighting word in arguments about animals and souls. Descartes and Boyle stand on one side of that fight. The most literal Greek mechanism we have is the Antikythera device, a bronze gear train from around the second century BC that tracked the moon and predicted eclipses, raised from a shipwreck in 1901.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1660s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
machinemechanicmachinationmechatronics
In a sentence
The locking mechanism jammed and the whole door had to come off.