Arterial

How to spell arterial

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce arterial

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does arterial mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the arteries, the vessels carrying blood from the heart.
2. adjectiveDescribing a major road that carries the main flow of traffic through an area.

Arterial in a sentence

• The surgeon checked for arterial damage during the operation.

• The council widened the main arterial route into the city centre.

• High blood pressure puts strain on the arterial walls.

• An accident on the arterial road backed up commuter traffic for miles.

Where does arterial come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word descends from the Latin arteria, which English took up by way of medical and scientific writing, and that Latin word was itself borrowed from the Greek artēria. In ancient Greek the term originally described the windpipe and only later came to mean the vessels carrying blood away from the heart, partly because early anatomists, dissecting dead bodies, often found these vessels empty of blood and full of air, and they connected the name to the idea of carrying air. The literal sense of the Greek root is bound up with the verb airein, meaning 'to lift' or 'to raise', so an arteria was thought of as something that conveys or holds aloft. By the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 'arterial' was settled in English as the adjective for anything pertaining to the arteries. The modern transport sense, an 'arterial road' that carries the main flow of traffic, is a vivid metaphor borrowed straight from the body's circulation. For spelling, it helps to remember the base noun 'artery' sitting inside it, with the y softening to an i before the -al ending.

How the word is built

• arteri- (from artery, a blood vessel)
• -al (adjective suffix: relating to)