Tuberculosis/Thousand #etymology

John Green has signed over a hundred thousand copies of his new book “Everything is Tuberculosis” in preparation f or its launch, and etymologically this is very appropriate! The word tuberculosis comes from Latin tuberculum “small swelling, pimple” (a diminutive of the word tuber “lump” which also makes it into English as a botanical term) + the Greek noun-forming suffix -osis, which is used in later medical terminology to indicate “the diseased condition of, state of”, in reference to the tubercles or nodules that form in the lungs due to the disease. Latin tuber, which can also mean “bump, swelling, tumour, truffle”, comes from Proto-Indo-European *tubh-, an extended form of the root *teuə- “to swell”. Another extended form of this root, *tus-, also makes it into Proto-Germanic as the first element in the compound *thus-hundi-, literally “swollen hundred” and thus “thousand”, becoming Old English þusend and Modern English thousand. Hundred is also formed from a number of other elements, hund- from PIE *km-tom “hundred” a reduced form of *dkm-tom- which is a suffixed form of *dekm- “ten”, with the -red part tacked on the end of the word hundred from Germanic *rath- “reckoning, number” from the PIE root *re(i)- “to reason, count” thus meaning literally “the number hundred”.