Systole

The story of the word

Greek grammarians used systolē first, for shortening a syllable that should be long; the heart sense came from physicians describing the pulse. English had both terms by the 1570s, half a century before William Harvey showed in 1628 that the contraction pushes blood round a closed circuit. It is the top number when a nurse reads your blood pressure aloud.

How it travelled

Ancient Greek → Late Latin → English

First recorded

16th century