Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Prosthesis
/prɑsˈθiːsɪs/noun
An artificial device replacing a missing body part.
The Greek roots
πρός
prós
to, toward
τίθημι
títhēmi
to put, place
Literally: “a putting-on, an addition”
The story of the word
The word entered English in the 1550s as a grammarian's term for adding a sound to the front of a word, which is how Latin schola became Spanish escuela. Surgeons took it around 1900 for artificial limbs, adding something to a body instead of a word. The root verb τίθημι sits under a surprising number of English nouns: thesis, hypothesis, synthesis, and apothecary, from the storehouse where things are put away.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1550s
Same family
thesishypothesissynthesisapothecaryepithet
In a sentence
The running prosthesis cost more than the car and lasted longer.