Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Opium
/ˈoʊpiəm/noun
The dried latex of the opium poppy, source of morphine and codeine.
The Greek roots
ὄπιον
ópion
poppy juice
Literally: “little sap”
Follow a root:ὄπιον1 word
The story of the word
ὄπιον is a diminutive of ὀπός, plant juice, so the name says little sap, which is exactly what it is: latex bled from a scored green seed head. Theophrastus describes the collecting, and Greek doctors treated the drug as both painkiller and poison. English took the word through Latin in the fourteenth century, roughly five centuries before anyone separated morphine out of it.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
opiateopioid
In a sentence
The fields were cleared of opium poppies and replanted with wheat.
Nineteenth-century cough syrups contained opium and said so on the label.