Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Typhoid
/ˈtaɪfɔɪd/noun
A bacterial fever caused by Salmonella Typhi, spread through contaminated water and food.
The Greek roots
τῦφος
typhos
smoke, feverish stupor
-οειδής
-oeidḗs
resembling
Literally: “typhus-like”
The story of the word
The name records a mistake in the act of being corrected: typhoid means typhus-like, and the two fevers were run together until Pierre Louis in Paris pulled them apart in the 1820s and William Jenner in London confirmed the distinction in 1849. The τῦφος underneath is smoke, used by Greek writers for the clouded mental state of a patient burning up. The two diseases now share nothing but the name, one carried by water and the other by lice.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1800
Same family
typhustyphoonspheroidasteroid
In a sentence
Mary Mallon spread typhoid through eight New York households without ever falling ill herself.