Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Tomography
/təˈmɒɡrəfi/noun
Imaging that builds a picture of the inside of a body in cross-sectional slices.
The Greek roots
τόμος
tómos
slice, section
γράφειν
gráphein
to write, draw
Literally: “slice drawing”
The story of the word
τόμος is a slice, from τέμνω, to cut, so the word means imaging by section. It appears in the 1930s for X-ray methods that moved tube and film together to blur everything outside one plane, long before Hounsfield's computed scanner of 1971 made the slices sharp. The same cutting root gives atom, the thing that cannot be cut, and anatomy, cutting up.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 20th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
atomanatomyepitomedichotomy
In a sentence
Computed tomography turned a suspected fracture into a certainty in about four minutes.