Etymologically
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ὕδερος

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Pronunciation

  • 5th-century BC Attic: /hý.de.ros/[1]
  • 4th-century AD Koine: /ˈy.ðe.ros/[1]
  • 10th-century Byzantine: /ˈy.ðe.ros/[1]

Forms

ῠ̔́δερος (húderos) m (genitive ῠ̔δέρου); second declension[1]

Etymology

Beekes takes it as inherited from Proto-Indo-European *udero- (“belly”),[2] cognate with Sanskrit उदर (udára-, “belly”), Latin uterus (“belly, womb”), Old Prussian weders (“belly, stomach”) and Lithuanian vė́daras (“sausage, intestines”).[2][3] On this view the sense moved from “belly” to “dropsy”, a shift that Sanskrit shows too, where udára- also means a diseased swollen belly.[2][3]

The older and common view, found in the dictionaries, derives it from ὕδωρ (húdōr, “water”), because dropsy is a build-up of water.[4][5][3] Beekes and Frisk keep the name of the disease apart from the word for water, since a full grade of this shape is otherwise unknown in Greek;[2][3] Frisk allows that a popular connection with water helped the shift of meaning.[3] Chantraine accepts the comparison with the words for “belly” but holds that within Greek the word was surely associated with water.[6]

Earliest recorded meaning

It first appears in the Hippocratic Corpus of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, as the name of dropsy.[7][5][2]

Semantic evolution

It remained a medical word: Aristotle uses it in the Nicomachean Ethics, and Plutarch and Lucian have it too.[5][4][8] The physicians derived from it adjectives meaning “dropsical” and verbs meaning “to suffer from dropsy”.[6] Galen calls diabetes “dropsy into the chamber pot”, because of the large amount of urine it causes.[5][6] It is a synonym of ὕδρωψ (húdrōps).[5]

Timeline

  • 5th century BC – Hippocratic treatises use it for dropsy.[7][5][9]
  • 4th century BC – Aristotle uses it in the Nicomachean Ethics.[5][9]
  • 1st–2nd century AD – Plutarch uses it.[4][9]
  • 2nd century AD – Galen calls diabetes a dropsy into the chamber pot.[5][6][9]

Meanings

Noun

  1. Dropsy, a build-up of fluid in the body.[5][4]
  2. (in the phrase ὕδερος εἰς ἀμίδα) Diabetes.[5][6]
  • ὕδρωψ (húdrōps)
  • Latin uterus

References

  1. ^ a b c d Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
  2. ^ a b c d e Beekes, Robert S. P. (2010), Etymological Dictionary of Greek, with the assistance of Lucien van Beek, Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 10, Leiden; Boston: Brill
  3. ^ a b c d e Frisk, Hjalmar (1960–1972), Griechisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 3 vols, Heidelberg: Carl Winter
  4. ^ a b c d Diggle, James, et al., eds. (2021), The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; Jones, Henry Stuart (1940), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., Oxford: Clarendon Press
  6. ^ a b c d e Chantraine, Pierre (2009), Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque: histoire des mots, new ed. with a supplement (Chroniques d'étymologie grecque 1–10), Paris: Klincksieck
  7. ^ a b Keersmaekers, Alek (2021–2025), GLAUx: The Greek Language Automated corpus, https://github.com/alekkeersmaekers/glaux
  8. ^ Pape, Wilhelm (1914), Griechisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch, 3rd ed., rev. Max Sengebusch, Braunschweig: Vieweg
  9. ^ a b c d Rodríguez Adrados, Francisco, et al., eds. (1980–), Diccionario Griego-Español, Madrid: CSIC, http://dge.cchs.csic.es/xdge