Mind & EmotionGreek → English
Prosopagnosia
/ˌprɑsoʊpæɡˈnoʊʒə/noun
An inability to recognise faces, including familiar ones, despite normal vision.
The Greek roots
πρόσωπον
prósōpon
face, mask
ἀ-
a-
not, without
γνῶσις
gnôsis
knowledge, recognition
Literally: “no knowledge of faces”
The story of the word
Joachim Bodamer named the condition in 1947, writing up soldiers with head wounds who could see a face in full detail and still not know whose it was. πρόσωπον began as the thing in front of the eyes, became the face, then the mask an actor wore, then the character behind the mask, and Latin persona followed exactly the same path. So the word for face-blindness has the ancient stage sitting inside it.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → German scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1947
Same family
agnosiadiagnosisprognosisprosopopoeia
In a sentence
He recognises his colleagues by voice and gait, because prosopagnosia has made faces useless to him.
Developmental prosopagnosia turns out to be far more common than the acquired kind.