Osteoporosis
/ˌɒstiəʊpəˈrəʊsɪs/noun
A loss of bone density that leaves the skeleton light, hollow and easily broken.
The Greek roots
Literally: “bone full of passages”
The story of the word
πόρος is a way through: a ford in a river, a strait between headlands, a pore in the skin. The compound is usually credited to the Strasbourg pathologist Jean Lobstein, who in the 1820s was describing what sawn bone looked like on his bench, not what a patient felt. That is the trouble with the disease and the honesty of its name, which records an appearance; density falls silently for decades until a wrist or a hip gives way.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
Her mother's osteoporosis was diagnosed only after a fall in the kitchen.
Weight-bearing exercise in your thirties buys bone you will want at seventy.