Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Thrombosis
/θrɒmˈboʊsɪs/noun
The formation of a blood clot inside a vessel, blocking the flow.
The Greek roots
θρόμβος
thrómbos
lump, clot, curd
Literally: “a clotting”
Follow a root:θρόμβος4 words
The story of the word
The Greek word starts in the dairy: θρόμβος is the lump in curdled milk, and Aeschylus uses it of gore. Rudolf Virchow gave the term its modern precision in the 1850s by separating thrombosis, a clot formed where it sits, from embolism, a clot carried in from somewhere else. His three conditions for clot formation are still taught as Virchow's triad.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → New Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1706
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
thrombusthrombocyteantithromboticembolism
In a sentence
Long flights raise the risk of thrombosis in the deep veins of the leg.