Earth & SkyGreek → English
Nephrite
/ˈnɛfraɪt/noun
The tougher of the two minerals sold as jade, a dense felted mass of amphibole fibres.
The Greek roots
νεφρός
nephrós
kidney
Literally: “kidney stone”
Follow a root:νεφρός5 words
The story of the word
Two languages named this stone after the same piece of folk medicine. Spanish colonists in the Americas called it piedra de ijada, stone of the flank, because it was worn against kidney pain, and that phrase wore down into English jade. European scholars translated the same idea into Latin as lapis nephriticus, and A. G. Werner clipped that to nephrite in the late eighteenth century. So jade and nephrite are the same superstition told twice.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → German → English
- First recorded
- 18th century
Same family
nephritisnephrologynephron
In a sentence
Maori toki were carved from nephrite hauled out of South Island rivers.