Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Sepsis
/ˈsɛpsɪs/noun
A life-threatening condition in which the body's response to infection damages its own organs.
The Greek roots
σῆψις
sêpsis
rotting, putrefaction
Literally: “putrefaction”
Follow a root:σῆψις1 word
The story of the word
σῆψις is what happens to meat left in the sun, and Hippocratic writers used it of wounds turning bad. Joseph Lister's carbolic spray of 1867 gave antiseptic something to do, and the noun sepsis settles into English medicine in the 1870s. What the word names has since changed completely: modern sepsis is not the rot but the body's own overwhelming reaction to it, which is why it can kill after the infection itself is under control.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1876
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
antisepticsepticsepticemiaaseptic
In a sentence
She was in hospital within the hour with suspected sepsis.
Sepsis kills more people every year than any single cancer.