Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Meconium
/mɪˈkoʊniəm/noun
The dark green-black first stool of a newborn, made of material swallowed in the womb.
The Greek roots
μήκων
mḗkōn
poppy
Literally: “little poppy juice”
Follow a root:μήκων1 word
The story of the word
μηκώνιον is the diminutive of poppy and meant the thickened juice of the poppy head, in other words crude opium. The transfer to the newborn's first stool is ancient and purely visual: the tarry black-green mass looks like it. English used meconium for poppy juice first, and the obstetric sense arrived later, so an eighteenth-century apothecary and a modern midwife would mean different things by the word.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
In a sentence
The midwife noted meconium in the fluid, which is why they moved her to the delivery room.