Necrophilia

The story of the word

The word belongs to nineteenth-century alienism, not to antiquity; the Belgian psychiatrist Joseph Guislain is usually credited with the French form around 1850, and Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis fixed it in the clinical vocabulary in 1886. νεκρός itself is unremarkable Greek for a dead body, and the Greeks used it in νεκρόπολις, city of the dead, which Strabo applies to the burial ground outside Alexandria. Necromancy is the older borrowing, questioning the dead rather than desiring them.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → French → English

First recorded

19th century