Word Ancestry

kōma

Ancient Greek

κῶμα (kôma)

deep sleep

Latinized Greek

coma

adopted into medical Latin and later English

Modern English

coma

a prolonged state of unconsciousness

Modern English

coma

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A coma is one of those grim medical words that sounds colder than the thing it names. Greek physicians used kōma for a deep sleep, and Latin scribes carried it into learned medical writing, where English doctors eventually picked it up in the 1640s. The eerie part is that English already had a plain old phrase for it in the Middle Ages: false sleep. That feels almost too poetic for hospitals, as if the body has slipped into a sleep that lies about being sleep at all. The word’s Greek ancestor is uncertain, which only makes it stranger: even the language seems to pause and go blank, like the patients it describes.

The Story

“

A coma is one of those grim medical words that sounds colder than the thing it names. Greek physicians used kōma for a deep sleep, and Latin scribes carried it into learned medical writing, where English doctors eventually picked it up in the 1640s. The eerie part is that English already had a plain old phrase for it in the Middle Ages: false sleep. That feels almost too poetic for hospitals, as if the body has slipped into a sleep that lies about being sleep at all. The word’s Greek ancestor is uncertain, which only makes it stranger: even the language seems to pause and go blank, like the patients it describes.