Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Miasma
/miˈæzmə/noun
A heavy, foul atmosphere, whether of air or of mood.
The Greek roots
μίασμα
míasma
pollution, defilement
Literally: “a staining”
Follow a root:μίασμα1 word
The story of the word
For Sophocles the miasma is ritual pollution rather than smell: Thebes suffers plague because an unpunished killing has stained the city, and the plot is a search for the stain. Nineteenth-century sanitarians took the word literally and blamed cholera on bad air, until John Snow traced an outbreak to one water pump in Broad Street. The moral sense came first by two thousand years.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
In a sentence
A miasma of old cooking oil hung in the stairwell.
The scandal left a miasma over the department that no reshuffle cleared.