Prognosis

How to spell prognosis

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce prognosis

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does prognosis mean?

1. nounA doctor's forecast of the likely course and outcome of a disease or injury.
2. nounA forecast or prediction of how a situation is likely to develop.

Prognosis in a sentence

• The oncologist gave a cautiously hopeful prognosis after the scan results.

• The analyst offered a gloomy prognosis for the company's next quarter.

• Early detection of the tumour greatly improves the prognosis.

• Economists shared a mixed prognosis for the housing market this year.

Where does prognosis come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes straight from the Greek prognosis, which literally meant 'foreknowledge' or 'knowing in advance'. It was built from pro, meaning 'before', and gnosis, meaning 'knowledge' or 'a knowing', the same gnosis root that sits inside 'diagnosis' and 'agnostic'. The verb behind it, progignoskein, meant 'to know beforehand', and ancient physicians used the noun for the art of predicting how an illness would unfold. English took the term over through medical Latin in the early 1600s, keeping it firmly tied to medicine before it broadened into any forecast of how a situation will develop. The silent 'g' and the unstressed final '-sis' are the spelling traps, both inherited unchanged from the Greek.

How the word is built

• pro- (before, beforehand)
• gnosis (knowledge, knowing)