Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Typhus
/ˈtaɪfəs/noun
A severe fever caused by Rickettsia bacteria and spread by body lice, marked by rash and delirium.
The Greek roots
τῦφος
typhos
smoke, stupor
τύφειν
týphein
to smoke, smoulder
Literally: “smokiness of mind”
The story of the word
Boissier de Sauvages fixed the name in 1759 and English had it by the 1780s, but the Greek word is far older: τῦφος meant smoke, and Hippocratic writers used it for the fogged, stuporous mind of a patient in high fever. The disease follows armies and famine, and it killed more of Napoleon's soldiers on the retreat from Moscow than the Russian army managed. Typhoid, its long-confused namesake, is a different infection entirely.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1780s
Same family
typhoidtyphoonstupor
In a sentence
Typhus swept the camps every winter until DDT delousing broke the cycle.