Colectomy

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Surgical removal of all or part of the large intestine, often performed to treat disease such as cancer or severe inflammation
2. An operation that cuts out some or all of the colon, typically done to remedy illness affecting the large bowel
3. The excision of a portion or the entirety of the large intestine by a surgeon, usually to address a serious bowel disorder

Etymology: Surgeons did not describe the removal of the colon by a single fixed term until modern times, and the word is a blunt piece of medical construction: "colectomy" is simply "colon" with "-ectomy" attached. The second element comes from Greek "ektomē", meaning "a cutting out", formed from "ek", "out of", and "tomē", "a cutting". The same pattern gives appendectomy, mastectomy and tonsillectomy, so once a reader recognises the suffix, the whole family of surgical terms falls into place. The first part, "col-", is a combining form of "colon", which comes from Greek "kolon", meaning "limb" or "clause". The Greek sense is clearly visible in the word: the intestine was named for the part of the body it resembled, and the same root later gave English its grammatical term "colon" for a punctuation mark, used for a clause of a sentence. Anatomists had borrowed the idea of a limb-like structure long before anyone needed to cut one out.