Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Metastasis
/məˈtæstəsɪs/noun
The spread of cancer cells from the original tumour to a distant part of the body.
The Greek roots
μετά
metá
change, across
στάσις
stásis
a standing, position
Literally: “a change of standing”
The story of the word
Ordinary Greek used μετάστασις for any shift of position: a migration, a change of government, and in rhetoric the manoeuvre of moving blame onto someone else. Hippocratic writers already used it for a disease that leaves one part of the body and appears in another, which is close to the modern sense without any idea of cells. Nineteenth-century pathologists made it technical, and it now carries most of the weight in a cancer prognosis, since it is spread rather than size that usually kills.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
stasisapostasystaticecstasysystem
In a sentence
The scan was clear, with no sign of metastasis in the liver.