Science and medicine

Names for elements, diseases, drugs and discoveries, many built from Greek and Latin by the scientists who needed them.

134 words, 2 with a full story

Full stories

HadoopHadoop is a made-up word. Doug Cutting's two-year-old son used it as the name of his stuffed yellow elephant, and… QuarantineQuarantine comes from the Venetian quarantena, "a space of forty days," the time ships from plague-hit ports had to…

More words

Other topics

See all 15 topics →

← All word origins, A to Z