Iasis

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A medical condition characterized by an abnormal state or pathological development affecting a specific part of the body
2. A term denoting the presence of disease or the effect of a pathological process in an organism
3. Referring to a specific disorder or affliction, often used in conjunction with other terms to describe the nature of the illness

Etymology: "-iasis" is a suffix, not a standalone word, but it is a real and productive one in medical English. It comes from Greek "-iasis", a noun-forming ending that names a condition or a state of disease, usually built on a verb ending in "-ian" or "-iazein". Greek physicians used it to describe a process or an affliction: "elephantiasis" describes the disease of becoming elephant-like, and "psoriasis" the condition of being itchy with scales. English took up the ending through Latin, which borrowed it as "-iasis" and used it for medical terms. Most English words ending this way were coined in the 18th and 19th centuries, when physicians drew on Greek to name newly described diseases. So "-iasis" appears in words like "amoebiasis" and "cholangiasis", many of them far younger than their Greek ending suggests.