Greek roots reveal the body part, condition or procedure inside many medical terms. Learn common forms and practise breaking down words such as gastroenteritis and neuropathy.
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Read the featured articleEconomics began with a word about household management and later borrowed equilibrium, elasticity, growth and other metaphors from the physical and living worlds.
Weather vocabulary combines old farming words, maritime observation, borrowed storm names and modern scientific terminology.
Chemistry did not begin with a clean vocabulary. Modern scientific language grew out of alchemy, craft traditions, Arabic scholarship and early modern attempts to standardise substances and reactions.
Physics repeatedly names things before scientists fully understand them. Atom, electron, photon and quantum preserve earlier theories, metaphors and linguistic choices.
Anaphora, antithesis, hyperbole, ethos and other rhetorical terms give technical names to patterns people use naturally in speeches, stories, arguments and jokes.
English vocabulary grew through contact with Norse, French, Latin, Greek and languages worldwide. Borrowed words change pronunciation, spelling and meaning until they become ordinary English.
Algebra, algorithm, cipher and zero carry the history of mathematical knowledge moving from India through the Arabic-speaking scholarly world into medieval Europe.
English law developed in a multilingual world. Old English, Latin and Law French left overlapping layers that still shape words such as verdict, tort, estate, plaintiff and habeas corpus.
Modern medical English contains ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic-mediated scholarship and ordinary English. The layers explain both the precision and the strangeness of medical vocabulary.
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