Spleen

The story of the word

Humoral medicine assigned black bile to this organ, and black bile made you melancholy, so from the sixteenth century the spleen was the seat of bad temper; venting your spleen is a fossil of that physiology. Confusingly, the same tradition also made it the source of laughter, and Elizabethan writers use the word for mirth and for spite in the same decade. Baudelaire took it into French as the title of his poems of urban gloom, by which point no one was thinking about the organ at all.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English

First recorded

14th century