Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Peristalsis
/ˌpɛrɪˈstɔlsɪs/noun
The travelling wave of muscular contraction that moves food through the gut.
The Greek roots
περί
perí
around
στέλλω
stéllō
to draw together, set
Literally: “a wrapping around”
The story of the word
περιστέλλω meant to wrap something round: to clothe a person, or to shroud a corpse. That is what the gut does to a mouthful, gripping it in a ring of muscle that travels ahead of it. Physicians took peristaltic in the seventeenth century and the noun peristalsis in the nineteenth. Because the wave and not gravity does the work, an astronaut in orbit swallows perfectly well, and so can you standing on your head. στέλλω also sent people: an apostle is one dispatched, an epistle is what gets sent instead.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
apostleepistlesystolediastole
In a sentence
Peristalsis slows to almost nothing after abdominal surgery, which is why patients are walked so early.