Excission

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The act of surgically removing a portion of tissue or an organ is called excision
2. This term refers to the procedure of cutting away specific anatomical structures for therapeutic purposes
3. The process of cutting out a part of the body to treat or diagnose a medical condition

Etymology: Excision comes from Latin "excisio," a noun built from "excidere," meaning "to cut out," which combines "ex-" ("out") with "caedere" ("to cut"). The same Latin root gives English "incision," the opposite action of cutting into something, and "scissors" comes through a different path from the same family of Latin words for cutting. The pairing is a useful reminder that surgical vocabulary in English is often built from everyday verbs of cutting. In English the word moved from its literal sense of cutting something out to a more general sense of removing a part of something, and later to a specific medical procedure in which tissue is cut away entirely. That specialised surgical use is the sense the word carries here, where the removal is deliberate and aimed at treating a condition. The word's literal core stayed the same across these uses: the action is always one of cutting out and taking away.

Synonyms: removal, excision, cutting, resection, extraction

Antonyms: addition, insertion, inclusion