Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Melatonin
/ˌmɛləˈtoʊnɪn/noun
A hormone released by the pineal gland in darkness, which sets the body's daily sleep rhythm.
The Greek roots
μέλας
mélās
black, dark
τόνος
tónos
tension, tone
Literally: “dark-pigment tension”
The story of the word
Aaron Lerner isolated it in 1958 while hunting a skin-whitening agent, and named it for what it did to frog melanocytes: the pigment granules pulled inward and the skin went pale. The sleep function was found afterwards. The second half of the name is borrowed from serotonin, the molecule it is made from.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1958
Same family
melancholymelaninserotoninmelanoma
In a sentence
Screen light in the evening delays the melatonin rise.
She takes half a milligram of melatonin on the first night after a long flight.