Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Tachycardia
/ˌtækɪˈkɑrdiə/noun
A resting heart rate above about 100 beats a minute.
The Greek roots
ταχύς
tachýs
swift, rapid
καρδία
kardía
heart
Literally: “swift heart”
The story of the word
The word waited on the instrument. Physicians could count a fast pulse for millennia, but the Greek compound was assembled only in the nineteenth century, once the sphygmograph and then the electrocardiogram made rate something you recorded rather than estimated. ταχύς also produced the tachometer on a car dashboard and the tachyon, the hypothetical faster-than-light particle Gerald Feinberg named in 1967.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
bradycardiatachometercardiaccardiology
In a sentence
The monitor showed a narrow-complex tachycardia at 160.
Caffeine and a missed night's sleep gave him a tachycardia that frightened him more than it should have.