Biopsy

How to spell biopsy

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce biopsy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does biopsy mean?

1. nounThe removal and examination of a sample of tissue from a living body to diagnose disease.
2. verbTo take and examine a tissue sample from a living body for diagnosis.

Biopsy in a sentence

• noun

  The surgeon ordered a biopsy of the suspicious mole.

• verb

  Doctors decided to biopsy the lump before recommending treatment.

• noun

  Results from the biopsy confirmed that the growth was benign.

• verb

  The specialist will biopsy the affected area next week.

Where does biopsy come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a modern medical coinage assembled from two Greek building blocks: bios, meaning 'life' or 'living tissue', and opsis, meaning 'sight' or 'a viewing'. So a biopsy is literally 'a looking at living tissue', the act of examining a sample taken from a living body. The word was minted in French as biopsie by the Paris dermatologist Ernest Besnier around 1879, on the model of an older sibling term, autopsy, which means 'a seeing for oneself' and is applied to the dead. English adopted it almost immediately, keeping the Greek-flavoured spelling intact. The trap for writers is the unstressed middle: the '-opsy' ending sounds like 'op-see', so it is easy to forget the silent shape and the single 's' before the 'y'.

How the word is built

• bio- (from Greek bios: life)
• -opsy (from Greek opsis: sight, viewing)