Epidemiology

How to spell epidemiology

12 letters · 7 syllables

How to pronounce epidemiology

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does epidemiology mean?

1. nounThe branch of medical science concerned with how diseases occur and spread through populations.

Epidemiology in a sentence

• She lectures in epidemiology at the university medical school.

• The report drew on decades of epidemiology to track the outbreak.

Where does epidemiology come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built entirely from Greek elements, although it reached English along a scientific path through French. At its heart sits the Greek epidemios, meaning 'among the people' or 'prevalent in a community', formed from epi 'upon, among' and demos 'the people' (the same demos that gives us 'democracy'). From epidemios came 'epidemic', the noun for a disease that sweeps through a population, and to that the suffix -logia 'the study or account of' (from logos, 'word, reason') was attached. The full term epidemiology appears in the nineteenth century as the name for the science that studies how and why diseases spread, who they affect, and how they can be controlled. The spelling trap lies in the unstressed run of vowels in the middle, the 'demi' before the 'ology', where the linking syllables blur together in speech and tempt writers to drop or swap a letter.

How the word is built

• epi- (upon, among)
• dem (from Greek demos: the people)
• -io- (linking vowel)
• -logy (study of, from logos: account)