WORD HISTORY: Hectic

The Usage Panel survey done for the first edition of the American Heritage Dictionary (1969) found that 92 percent of the Panel approved of the use of hectic in its most familiar sense, "characterized by feverish activity, confusion, or haste." The question was posed because earlier that sense had sometimes been deprecated as a loose extension of the term's meaning in medicine, "relating to an undulating fever, such as those accompanying tuberculosis." Without some acquaintance with Middle English one would not recognize the first recorded instance of the word, etik, in a text written before 1398. The Middle English term comes from the Old French development of the Late Latin word hecticus, whose form helped reshape our word in the 16th century. Hecticus comes from Greek hektikos, "formed by habit or forming habit" and "consumptive." The last sense developed because of the chronic nature of tuberculous fevers. Thus a word that once meant "habitual" eventually had an English descendant used to refer to conditions that most would want to be rare.