Uremia is a rather nasty condition characterized by high contents of urea in your blood. The name for it was borrowed in 1857 from a Latinized form of the Ancient Greek root words, those being ouron, meaning "urine", and haima, meaning "blood" (so the meaning is "urine blood", and that makes a lot of sense, considering the nature of the disease). Probably through Proto-Hellenic, ouron traces to Proto-Indo-European, but which root? It could be ur, meaning "urine", hwers, meaning "to rain", or wehr, meaning "liquid". Overall, though, this doesn't matter, because it's thought that all of those reconstructions are related somehow. Going back to haima (also the first element in words like hemoglobin and hemhorrhoid), it also is a little bit uncertain in etymology, but linguists think it may hail from Proto-Indo-European sai, which referred to any kind of thick liquid. Usage of uremia in literature has been dramatically decreasing since a local maximum in the 1980s and a high in the 1910s.
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. I have a linguistics degree from Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote my thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy traveling, trivia, philosophy, board games, conlanging, and art history.
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