Visceral

How to spell visceral

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce visceral

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does visceral mean?

1. adjectiveFelt as a deep, instinctive bodily reaction rather than arrived at by reasoning.
2. adjectiveRelating to the internal organs of the body, especially those in the abdomen.

Visceral in a sentence

• The film provoked a visceral reaction in almost everyone who watched it.

• The surgeon explained that visceral fat surrounds the organs deep within the abdomen.

• Her visceral dislike of crowded lifts made the commute exhausting.

• Chronic visceral pain can be difficult to locate precisely.

Where does visceral come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin viscera, the plural noun for the soft internal organs of the body such as the gut, liver, and heart. The Romans built an adjective, visceralis, meaning 'belonging to the inner organs', and English adopted it in the late 1500s with that same strictly anatomical meaning. Because the ancients located strong emotion in the bowels and the gut rather than the brain, the word gradually took on its now-dominant figurative sense: a feeling that strikes deep and instinctively, as if felt in the body rather than reasoned out. The same viscera root survives unchanged in medical English, and remembering that the spine of the word is the noun 'viscera' explains the tricky middle: it is visc-er-al, with that buried 'er' rather than a softer 'ar' or 'ral'. The unstressed syllables after the stressed first one are exactly where careful writers slip.

How the word is built

• viscer- (from Latin viscera: internal organs)
• -al (adjective suffix: relating to)