Diagnose

How to spell diagnose

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce diagnose

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does diagnose mean?

1. verbTo identify the nature of an illness or a problem by examining its signs and symptoms.

Diagnose in a sentence

• The consultant took two weeks to diagnose the rare blood disorder.

• Engineers used the software logs to diagnose the fault in the engine.

Where does diagnose come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek diagnosis, which literally meant 'a distinguishing' or 'a discerning'. It was built from the prefix dia-, meaning 'apart' or 'through', and the verb gignoskein, meaning 'to know' or 'to recognise', so the underlying idea was to know one thing apart from another, that is, to tell things apart. The noun 'diagnosis' entered English in the seventeenth century through Latin and was used by physicians for identifying a disease by its signs. The verb 'diagnose' is actually a later back-formation, created from the noun in the early nineteenth century by trimming off the ending. The same gno root for knowing shows up in surprising relatives such as 'know' itself, 'gnostic', and 'prognosis', and remembering that the middle is g-n (a silent g before n) helps fix the spelling.

How the word is built

• dia- (apart, through)
• gnos (from gignoskein: to know)
• -e (back-formation verb ending)