Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Narcolepsy
/ˈnɑːrkəlɛpsi/noun
A neurological disorder causing overwhelming daytime sleepiness and, often, sudden loss of muscle tone triggered by emotion.
The Greek roots
νάρκη
nárkē
numbness, torpor
λῆψις
lêpsis
a seizing, attack
Literally: “seizure of numbness”
The story of the word
Jean-Baptiste-Édouard Gélineau built the name in 1880 for patients ambushed by sleep in the middle of ordinary activity. νάρκη is the numbness that also produced narcotic, and the Greeks used the same word for the electric ray, the fish that numbs whatever touches it, which Latin then called the torpedo. Most cases turn out to involve the loss of a few thousand hypothalamic neurons that make orexin, a discovery of the late 1990s.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1880s
Same family
narcoticepilepsycatalepsynarcosis
In a sentence
Her narcolepsy went undiagnosed for eleven years and was put down to laziness.