Neuroscience

How to spell neuroscience

12 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce neuroscience

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does neuroscience mean?

1. nounThe scientific study of the nervous system, especially the brain and how it governs behaviour and thought.

Neuroscience in a sentence

• She switched from medicine to neuroscience to study how memories form.

• Recent advances in neuroscience have changed how doctors treat strokes.

Where does neuroscience come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a modern compound, stitched together from two very old roots. The first half, neuro-, comes from the ancient Greek neuron, which literally meant 'sinew', 'string', or 'tendon' before it settled into its modern medical sense of 'nerve'. The second half traces back to the Latin scientia, meaning simply 'knowledge', which itself grew out of the verb scire, 'to know'. The two were joined in the middle of the twentieth century as researchers began treating the study of the nervous system as a single, unified discipline, with the word becoming common in English from roughly the 1960s onward. The spelling trap lives in the front: the Greek 'eu' vowel cluster spells the 'oor' sound here, and the silent 'c' in the 'sci' of 'science' is the same one that hides in 'conscience' and 'scissors'.

How the word is built

• neuro- (from Greek neuron: nerve)
• science (from Latin scientia: knowledge)