Which came first tissue or tissue, but in what sense?
Asked by
warpling (
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January 20th, 2009
Tissue paper, or tissues of the body. I would guess the bodily kind, but maybe there was such a word that once meant neither things. Anyone have any insight?
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7 Answers
Yes, it’s from the Latin textare, according to the OED, and it meant ‘to weave,’ then to Old French where it became tissu, which meant ‘woven.’
askoxford.com is a great resource; you can look up words from the Oxford English Dictionary and have more fun with words there.
Surely there are good sources for looking up the Etymology of words. You could start with the dictionary.
like april said, body “tissue” is just a translation of the original greek word “istos” which means “web”. Similarly, the paper tissue is a woven material (the original ones of course not being made out of paper), and the origin is Latin. So I guess the original comes from spiders.
As far as the usage of the word goes, “tissue” was used to refer to textiles before it was used to refer to either the anatomy or the handkerchief.
@Jack79: why do you mention Greek? The word is from Latin texere “to weave”.
Not the word, the meaning. The idea that there is a web of “stuff” inside our body, which was called “istos” (just like a spider’s web). When the Romans translated that into Latin, they used their own equivalent of the word, hence “textere”.
btw “text” also comes from that. And “textile” of course.
And even the root is originally the same, but that’s a different story.
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