Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Zoster
/ˈzɒstər/noun
A painful blistering rash caused by the reawakened chickenpox virus, running as a band along one nerve.
The Greek roots
ζωστήρ
zōstḗr
belt, girdle
Literally: “belt”
Follow a root:ζωστήρ1 word
The story of the word
In Homer a ζωστήρ is the war-belt, the thing an arrow has to get past before it reaches the man. Medicine borrowed it because herpes zoster comes up as a strip of blisters wrapping one side of the trunk, following a single nerve root and stopping dead at the midline. The everyday English name arrived at the same picture down the other road, from Latin cingulum, a girdle, which gave shingles. Two names for one disease, both of them saying belt.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
Same family
zonezonule
In a sentence
The rash stopped exactly at the midline, which pointed straight at zoster.
Anyone who has had chickenpox carries the virus that later causes zoster.