Words ending in "-drome"

From Greek dromos, a running-course

Etymology — a Greek word for running, hiding in English

A family of English words built on the Greek dromos, meaning a run, a race or the course it is run on, from the verb dramein, to run. It gives the arena where horses raced, the banked track where cyclists still do, the field where aircraft land, the set of symptoms that occur together, and the early warning signs that go in front of an illness. The camel named for its speed belongs to the same family, as do the adjectives describing salmon running up rivers and eels running down them.

How to spot them

▸A Greek word for running, and the course you run it on
▸One of them is a medical term meaning 'running together'
▸One of them was the chariot-racing arena of Constantinople
▸The camel and the rhumb line both belong to the group

Key facts

A cycling track, a chariot arena and an aircraft landing field all take their ending from one Greek word for a running-course

Greek dromos, from dramein, to run

In medicine the ending means 'running together': a set of signs and symptoms that habitually occur as a group

Syndrome, from Greek syndromē

The one that runs in front: a physician's word for the early warning symptoms before an illness proper begins

Prodrome

The chariot arena of Constantinople, where a riot in 532 left tens of thousands dead (532)

The Hippodrome and the Nika riots, which nearly cost Justinian his throne

A camel named for its speed rather than its humps

Dromedary, the one-humped camel, from Latin dromedarius, 'running camel'

A line on a Mercator chart that crosses every meridian at the same angle

Loxodrome, or rhumb line — from Greek loxos, slanting

Salmon run up rivers to spawn and eels run down to the sea: the two adjectives share the same root

Anadromous and catadromous

Samuel Pierpont Langley coined the name of his flying machines from the Greek for 'air runner'; the British applied the word to the field instead

Aerodrome

Key ideas

Greek roots arrive in English in clusters, and knowing the root unlocks the whole set. Recognising dromos turns eight unrelated-looking words — an arena, a cycle track, an airfield, a disease pattern, a warning sign, a camel, a navigation line and a fish's migration — into one idea.

Quick-fire facts

•Greek dromos means a run, a race or a racecourse, from dramein, to run
•The hippodrome is literally a horse-course; the Hippodrome of Constantinople held perhaps 100,000 spectators
•The velodrome takes the French vélo, a bicycle, and dates from the 1890s
•Syndrome entered English in the seventeenth century and means literally 'a running together'
•A prodrome is an early symptom occurring before a disease is established — the aura before a migraine, for example
•Palindrome was coined by Ben Jonson in the 1620s, from palin, 'again', plus the same root
•The dromedary is the one-humped Arabian camel; the Bactrian has two
•Anadromous fish such as salmon breed in fresh water and live at sea; catadromous fish such as eels do the reverse
•Aerodrome was coined by Samuel Pierpont Langley in the 1890s for his experimental aircraft, not for the ground they flew from
•An autodrome is a motor-racing circuit; the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza opened in 1922

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources

C. T. Onions — The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology
Douglas Harper — Online Etymology Dictionary Consulted for dated first attestations; cited without URL