Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Phagocyte
/ˈfæɡəsaɪt/noun
A cell that engulfs and digests bacteria, debris and dying cells.
The Greek roots
φαγεῖν
phageîn
to eat, devour
κύτος
kýtos
hollow vessel
Literally: “eating cell”
The story of the word
Élie Metchnikoff pushed a rose thorn into a starfish larva at Messina in 1882 and watched wandering cells gather round the splinter and try to eat it, which gave him the theory of cellular immunity. The Greek name was supplied by his Vienna colleague Carl Claus. Metchnikoff then spent two decades defending the idea against chemists who insisted immunity lay in the fluid of the blood, and in 1908 he shared the Nobel Prize with one of them.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1880s
Same family
macrophagesarcophagusesophagusbacteriophage
In a sentence
Phagocytes reach the splinter within hours and start clearing it.
The pus is mostly dead phagocytes that finished the job and did not survive it.