Pronounced: SNOUT-fare, noun/adj
Notes: Sounds like an unpleasant word
Yesterday’s word
The word sigmoid means
- curved like the letter ‘C’
- curved in two directions like the letter ‘S’
- of, relating to, or being the sigmoid colon (in the large intestine)
First usage
Our word came into English in the mid-1600s
Background / Comments
Our word comes from sigma, the 18th letter of the Greek alphabet. I was puzzled at the first and second definitions, because they quite different, but it turns out that the sigma has a form shaped like the Roman ‘C’, but sigma is normally brought into English as an ‘S’ – and thus the two definitions. While it can refer to the curve in a graph, our word is normally used these days to refer to the curve in the large intestine.
