Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Stethoscope
/ˈstɛθəskoʊp/noun
An instrument for listening to sounds inside the body.
The Greek roots
στῆθος
stêthos
chest, breast
σκοπεῖν
skopeîn
to look at, examine
Literally: “chest-viewer”
The story of the word
René Laennec rolled a sheet of paper into a tube in 1816 rather than press his ear to a young woman's chest, heard the heart more clearly than ever, and named the wooden instrument he then built in his 1819 treatise. The name says look, not listen, because -scope had already come to mean instrument for examining. His first version was a single rigid cylinder; the two rubber tubes came decades later.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1820s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
microscopetelescopescepticbishop
In a sentence
She warmed the stethoscope on her palm before touching it to his back.