Apheretic

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Relating to or involving the process of removing specific components from blood and returning the rest to the donor or patient
2. Concerning a medical procedure in which blood is drawn, certain elements are separated out, and the remainder is returned to the body
3. Of or pertaining to apheresis, a therapeutic technique that selectively extracts particular blood constituents while reinfusing other components

Etymology: "Apheretic" is a US spelling of "aphaeretic," a technical term in linguistics and grammar for the loss of an unstressed vowel or syllable at the beginning of a word, as in "lone" from "alone" or "squire" from "esquire." The adjective comes from Ancient Greek "aphairetikos," meaning "taking away" or "fit for removing," built from "aphairein," "to take away," which combines "apo," "away from," with "hairein," "to take." The Greek root gives the word its logic: the sound is literally taken away from the front of the word. Ancient Greek grammarians already had the idea of removing letters from the beginning of words, and the English term keeps that sense in its spelling and meaning. The Oxford English Dictionary records the English form "aphæretic" as an adjective, and the modern spelling "apheretic" simply drops the diphthong used in British usage.