amputation

Etymology

It is borrowed from Middle French amputation or directly borrowed from Latin amputātiō (“process of pruning; cutting off”),^[2][3][4][5] a noun of action from the past participle of amputō (“to cut off, lop off, prune”),^[2][3][6] formed from ambi- (“around”), shortened to am-, and putō (“to prune, trim”),^[3][7][8] from Proto-Indo-European *pau- (“to cut, strike, stamp”).^[3][7] The French word is recorded from 1478, in a translation of Chauliac, as a medical term.^[2] The OED compares Italian amputazione (1357), Spanish amputación and Dutch amputatie, the last from French.^[2] The verb amputate followed in the 17th century, perhaps as a back-formation from the noun.^[4][3]

Earliest recorded meaning

The surgical cutting off of a limb or another part of the body: 1597, in Peter Lowe's Whole Course of Chirurgerie.^[2] Barnhart's first record is Cotgrave's dictionary of 1611,^[4] and Etymonline dates the word to the 1610s, both for pruning trees and for cutting off a limb.^[3]

Semantic evolution

From the first the English word was mainly surgical, though Latin amputātiō meant pruning as well as cutting off a part of the body.^[2][3] The general sense of removing something by cutting, literally or figuratively, followed in 1603,^[2] and Merriam-Webster Unabridged applies it also to cutting letters or passages out of a text.^[8] The Shorter Oxford calls the sense "pruning" obsolete except as a figurative use of the surgical one,^[9] and the OED notes that the general sense now usually alludes to the surgical one.^[2] From 1653 the word also meant the place where a limb had been cut off.^[2] Johnson (1755) described the operation at length, as the cutting off of a limb with a steel instrument.^[10]

Timeline

• 1597 – the surgical cutting off of a limb.^[2][11]
• 1603 – the removal of something by cutting, also figurative.^[2][11]
• 1653 – the place where a limb has been cut off.^[2]

Meanings

Noun

1. The cutting off of a limb or other part of the body, by surgery or as the result of an injury: The frostbite was so severe that amputation of two toes was unavoidable.^[8][2]
2. A cutting or lopping off, as in pruning; figuratively, the removal of a part from a whole: an amputation of the budget.^[8][2]
3. The removal of letters, words or passages from a text; excision.^[8][2]

Word family

• nonamputation
• postamputation

Related words

• amputate
• amputee
• putative
• ambi-
• pave

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c d e f g Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
4. ^ a b c Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
5. ^ Hoad, T. F., ed. (1986), The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, Oxford: Clarendon Press
6. ^ Klein, Ernest. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–1967.
7. ^ a b The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
8. ^ a b c d e Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
9. ^ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
10. ^ Johnson, Samuel (1755), A Dictionary of the English Language, London; 4th ed. 1773; Johnson's Dictionary Online, ed. Beth Rapp Young et al.
11. ^ a b Kay, Christian; Roberts, Jane; Samuels, Michael; Wotherspoon, Irené, eds. (2009), Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press; online edition (2024)