Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Pandemic
/pænˈdɛmɪk/
A disease outbreak that spreads across whole regions or the world.
The Greek roots
πᾶν
pân
all
δῆμος
dêmos
people
Literally: “affecting all the people”
The story of the word
Where an epidemic sits 'upon the people', a pandemic reaches 'all the people' — the prefix pân widening the scope of the same root.
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
In a sentence
The pandemic reshaped how the world worked and travelled.