Arterectomy

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A medical intervention that entails surgically excising a segment of an artery to treat various vascular conditions
2. This refers to a procedure in which a specific portion of an artery is surgically removed to address health-related concerns
3. The process of surgically cutting out part of an artery for medical treatment

Etymology: "Arterectomy" is an alternative spelling of "arteriectomy", and its parts are plain and transparent. The first, "arterio-", comes from Greek "artēria", the word for a windpipe or blood vessel, which the ancient Greeks used for the arteries as well. The second, "-ectomy", comes from Greek "ektomē", meaning "a cutting out", and it is the standard medical suffix for surgically removing a body part, as in "appendectomy". Put together, the word literally means the cutting out of an artery. The surprise lies in the first element. Greek "artēria" did not originally name blood vessels at all: Aristotle used it for the windpipe, and it was only later that the term came to be applied to the vessels carrying blood. Modern surgical vocabulary of this kind was built from classical roots, so the word is a technical coinage rather than something the Greeks ever used.