Physique

The story of the word

English took physique from French in the 1820s, where it was the ordinary adjective physique, physical, pressed into service as a noun for the body's constitution. Underneath sits φύσις, the Greek word for nature as something that grows, which is why the pre-Socratic thinkers who studied the natural world were called physiologoi. The same root supplies physics, physician and physiology, so the word for a gym-built torso shares its ancestry with the science of matter.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English

First recorded

1820s