Clinic

How to spell clinic

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce clinic

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does clinic mean?

1. nounA place where patients receive medical advice or treatment, often for a specific purpose.
2. nounA session offering specialised instruction or practical coaching in a particular skill.

Clinic in a sentence

• The local clinic offers flu vaccinations every autumn.

• The coach ran a free batting clinic for junior players.

• She booked an appointment at the dental clinic near the station.

• He signed up for a writing clinic to sharpen his essays.

Where does clinic come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek klinike, short for klinike tekhne, meaning 'the practice at the bedside', built on kline, a couch or bed, which in turn came from the verb klinein, 'to lean or recline'. Greek physicians used klinikos to describe a doctor who attended patients lying in bed, and that bedside association carried right through the centuries. Latin took it up as clinicus, and French reshaped it into clinique, which English borrowed in the early 1600s, at first to mean teaching given at a patient's bedside rather than from a lecture hall. By the nineteenth century the sense had broadened to the place itself, a building or department where patients are examined and treated. The same klinein root that gives 'recline' and 'incline' is hiding inside clinic, a neat reminder that the word began with the simple idea of a patient leaning back on a couch.

How the word is built

• clin- (from Greek klinein: to lean, recline, hence a sickbed)
• -ic (forming a noun/adjective)