Ologies and Isms

OLOGIES AND ISMS

by Michael Quinion

Aquaculture? Haemophilia? Isochronous?
Neuralgia? Polyunsaturated? Rodenticide?

We all have a childlike love of playing with words, adding bits, Lego-style, to create new ones. And we often wonder where words come from and how they are formed.

This book fills a gap we hardly knew existed. Ologies and Isms is about the building blocks of the English language—the beginnings and endings, sometimes the middles—that help create many of the words we use.

How often do we see a common technical or medical word without quite knowing what it means? Does your blood run cold when you hear haemophilia; do you pale at paleobotany? If we can decipher such words, we can start to understand others of a similar kind.

Whether you’re a student or practitioner, a teacher of English, an inveterate word user, a logophile who is phobic about technological inexactitudes, or just a seeker-out of linguistic trifles, Ologies and Isms will help you to understand the language of the world around you.

The text is set out in an extended prose form that is more accessible to non-specialists than a condensed dictionary format and contains over 10,000 examples within 1250 entries. A selective thematic index breaks prefixes and suffixes down by themes such as Biochemistry and drugs, Living world, Medicine and surgery, and Places and peoples.

A sample review

From the Library Journal, 15 September 2003: “This book defines various word beginnings and endings—some of the building blocks of the English language—and manages to make the whole thing fun. .. The author has experience working with the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of New Words, and it shows. Even if you think you know the English language, you will learn a thing or two from this little volume. Easy to use, small enough to carry around, and chockfull of useful information, this book is for anyone who truly loves language.”

Example entries

cardi(o)– The heart. [Greek kardia, heart.]

The medical study of the heart is cardiology, practised by a cardiologist; an electrocardiogram (Greek graphein, write), or ECG, is a record or display of a person’s heartbeat, created by an electrocardiograph. Several adjectives relate to the heart as part of the wider body system; these include cardiovascular (Latin vasculum, a little vessel) for the heart and its blood vessels, cardiopulmonary (Latin pulmo, pulmon–, lung) for the heart and lungs, and cardiothoracic (Greek thorax, chest) for the heart and chest. Outside medicine the most common compound is cardioid for a heart-shaped curve in mathematics.

franken– Genetically modified. [The first element of the name of Baron Victor Frankenstein, from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus of 1818.]

Activists sometimes describe genetically modified foods as Frankenstein foods, evoking Baron Frankenstein’s creation of a living being, in popular understanding a terrifying monster who turns on his creator and destroys him. The first element of his name appears in various invented words—such as frankenfood, frankencrop, and frankenfruit—with the technology known generically as frankenscience (all are often written with initial capital letter). They are all deeply pejorative.

–saur Also –saurus. Reptiles, especially extinct ones. [Greek sauros, lizard.]

The strict difference between these endings is that –SAURUS indicates a systematic genus name (with an initial capital letter), while –SAUR appears in Anglicized common names. For example, a tyrannosaur (Greek turannos, tyrant), a carnivorous dinosaur of the late Cretaceous period, is placed in the genus Tyrannosaurus (the species best known is actually Tyrannosaurus rex). However, it is common for the genus names to be used as common names, but with lower-case initial letter—for example, brontosaurus (Greek bront, thunder) is more common than brontosaur.

The first such formation was dinosaur (Greek deinos, terrible) as a general name for the group. Many others exist, such as ichthyosaur (Greek ikhthus, fish), mosasaur (Latin Mosa, for the River Meuse near which it was discovered), plesiosaur (Greek plesios, near), and stegosaur (Greek stege, covering, referring to its bony back plates). All these, except dinosaur itself, have associated genus names in –SAURUS (Ichthyosaurus, Stegosaurus).