Senior managing editor and logophile Andy Hollandbeck reveals the sometimes surprising roots of common English words and phrases. Remember: Etymology tells us where a word comes from, but not what it means today.
It’s a crustacean, it’s a sign of the zodiac, and it’s one of the scariest diagnoses you can get. But how are the sign of the crab and a disease that grows uncontrollably connected linguistically? It goes way back to at least the time of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, in the late fifth and early fourth centuries B.C.
Hippocrates and other early medicine men took note of certain growths — we would call them tumors — that did not leak pus and that would become hard as a rock. They called these tumors karkinos, the Greek word for “crab.” Karkinos was later Latinized to become the noun cancer (referring to both the disease and the crustacean) and combining form carcino-.
Exactly why that zoological metaphor was chosen isn’t entirely clear, because there are several possible connections. Perhaps it was the hardness that reminded them of a crab’s shell. The 7th-century A.D. Greek physician Paul of Aegina noted that people who had such tumors often died from them, offering that maybe cancer was “so called because it adheres to any part which it seizes upon in an obstinate manner like a crab.” He and others also noted, however, a possible visual resemblance: “The veins are filled and stretched around [a tumor] like the feet of the animal karkinos.”
Regardless, tumors and crabs have been linguistically linked for 2,500 years. And because these ancients didn’t have the medical knowledge we do today, for most of that time karkinos and cancer referred to growths or masses, not to the broader illness. Only in relatively recent medical history has humanity begun to differentiate between benign and malignant tumors and to understand that not all cancers produce tumors (a word that comes from the Latin tumere “to swell”).
As I mentioned before, karkinos also led to the combining form carcino-. So why is someone who studies, diagnoses, and treats cancer called an oncologist instead of a carcinologist? In part, it was because it took humanity so long to grasp the nature of cancer and tumors. Advances in hematology (the study of blood) and the invention of anesthetics opened new avenues of cancer research and treatment in the mid-19th century; by the time cancer study evolved into its own discipline, carcinology had already been established as the study of crustaceans.
The word oncology was coined in English in the second half of the 1850s. It stems from the Latin oncos, which is an alteration of the earlier Greek onkos, both referring to “a mass, swelling.” Oncology, then, hearkens back to the earliest days of trying to understand growths on the body.
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Comments
No, the link between these words never would have occurred to me, but neither have a lot of others, so there. The origin of karkinos leading to carcino which my mind automatically adds genic at the end, which we know cigarettes are, and one of the leading causes of cancer. The origin of oncology is interesting here.
It does seem that the medical profession has probably had as reasonable an understanding of tumors and cancer as well as they could at any given time over the centuries. Even with all the state-of-the-art technology we have now, it’s still a formidable foe.