Volaemia

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The total amount of blood circulating through the vessels of the body at any given time
2. The overall quantity of blood flowing within a living organism's circulatory system
3. The measure of how much blood is present in the circulation of an individual

Etymology: Volaemia is a medical coinage, built in modern times from two pieces rather than inherited from the ancient world. Its first half is the English word "volume," which in this case means the total amount of something: here, the whole quantity of blood circulating through the body. Its second half is "-emia," a suffix taken from New Latin, the scientific Latin used by European physicians and naturalists from the early modern period onward. That suffix comes from Greek "haima," meaning blood, and it is the same ending found in words such as "anemia" and "leukemia," where it signals a condition of the blood. Put together, the pieces describe exactly what the term measures: the volume of blood. Because the ending belongs to the vocabulary of blood conditions and the first element names a quantity, the word reads as a precise technical label rather than a traditional name. Ancient physicians had no such term, since they had no means of measuring the total blood volume in a living person.