Xanthiuria

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A medical condition defined by the occurrence of a heightened presence of yellow pigments in urine
2. A pathological state characterized by an abnormal increase of yellow-colored pigments in urine
3. A health condition that manifests as an unusual elevation of yellow pigments within the urine

Etymology: Xanthiuria is a dated variant of xanthinuria, a medical term for a rare inherited condition in which urine takes on a yellowish colour because the body excretes too much xanthine, a compound related to uric acid. The "xantho" part of the word comes from the Greek "xanthos", meaning yellow, which also gives us words for yellow pigments and certain yellow-flowered plants. The second half is the more interesting part. It comes from the Greek "ouron", meaning urine, and the verb "oureo", to urinate, the same stem that appears in English words such as urine and urinary. Medical Latin later turned this into the suffix "-uria", used to name conditions where something abnormal appears in the urine, so diabetes-related sugar in the urine is glycosuria and protein in the urine is proteinuria. Xanthine itself was named for its colour, but the condition is named after the substance found in the urine, so a sufferer's urine is yellow only indirectly, through the compound. Modern clinicians tend to use the standard form xanthinuria, leaving this older spelling mostly to older texts.