Paranoia

The story of the word

Greek writers used παράνοια loosely for madness of any kind, thinking gone sideways. German psychiatry revived it as a technical term in the nineteenth century, and Kraepelin narrowed it to systematised delusions of persecution held by a patient whose reasoning is otherwise intact. The everyday English sense, ordinary jumpy suspicion, is only about seventy years old.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → medical Latin → English

First recorded

19th century