Anatomy

How to spell anatomy

7 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce anatomy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does anatomy mean?

1. nounThe branch of science concerned with the bodily structure of humans, animals, and other living organisms.
2. nounThe physical structure of a particular organism or thing, especially its internal parts.

Anatomy in a sentence

• Medical students spend their first year studying human anatomy.

• The surgeon described the precise anatomy of the damaged knee.

• The textbook on anatomy includes detailed diagrams of the skeleton.

• The documentary explored the anatomy of a great white shark.

Where does anatomy come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek anatomia, meaning a 'cutting up' or 'dissection', built from ana-, which here means 'up' or 'apart', and temnein, the verb 'to cut'. The original sense was very literal: to learn how a body was put together, early investigators cut it open and took it apart. The term passed into Latin as anatomia and reached English in the late 1300s by way of Old French anatomie. The same Greek temnein root for cutting surfaces in words such as 'atom' (something that cannot be cut) and the medical '-tomy' endings like 'appendectomy'. Knowing that the middle of the word carries the 'cut' root, tom, can help fix the single t and the unstressed vowels that follow.

How the word is built

• ana- (up, apart)
• tom (cut)
• -y (noun of process/study)