Lysis as a Greek Suffix

When I first began to study classical Greek in 1971, the first verb I learned was "luein." It was the "model verb" we used to learn the person and number endings for the verb in general. I recall my confusion at learning that the English definition of "luein" was "to loose." I was not quite sure what "to loose" meant; I knew the word as an adjective ("Bill, your pants are too loose," etc.) but I had never had used the word "loose" as a verb. Thus, I thought I was destined not only never to learn Greek but also never really to understand English.

Thankfully I gained my momentum rather quickly, and learned also that luein meant to "destroy" or to "separate" or "loosen." Thus, I had one verb in Greek, and I went around campus saying to myself luo, lueis, luei... Well, when the Greek letter upsilon is brought into English it frequently becomes a "y," and so I learned that whenever an English word ends in lysis or lytic it is derived from this basic Greek verb, meaning "to destroy" or "to separate."

Lists of "Lysis" Words

This web site lists 66 words ending in lysis in our language. Almost all of the terms are scientific terms, but we should stop and look at many of them in order to deepen our knowledge of this important group of words. Let's begin with the word lysis itself. Lysis is the gradual decline of a disease process, such as a fever. More precisely, lysis is "the disintegration of cells or cell organelles." Before getting to many scientific terms that end in lysis, let's begin with the most familiar word in English so ending: analysis. The Greek preposition ana means "above" or "back" or "again" or acts as an intensive. Therefore the Greek verb analuein means the "unloosing" of something. In English, analysis is "the resolution or breaking up of anything complex into its various simple elements, the opposite process to synthesis." Thus, when we analyze something we are breaking it up into smaller units so as to be able to understand it. Analysis, then, is "picking things apart."

Well, let's move on to the second most familiar term ending with lysis: psychoanalysis, which is, therefore, the picking apart of the psyche or mind (I suppose paralysis is also as frequently used as psychoanalysis). Why isn't there, on the analogy of synthesis, an English word psychosynthesis? This would be the process of putting your mind back together. Actually, the word exists but it isn't well attested in English usage. Psychoanalysis occurs 50X more frequently than psychosynthesis in a Google search. I would much rather have someone be able to put me back together than take me apart. Wouldn't you? Well, as I was searching through "psycho" words, I discovered another "lysis" or "lytic" word, which actually helps us understand not just a word or two but aspects of our culture over the past 50 years: psycholytic.

Psycholytic is defined by the OED as "applied to a drug such as LSD which can disturb or disrupt certain emotional reactions that have become fixed in the unconscious ro can block normal channels of response." That is, shortly after LSD was discovered in the mid-1940s by Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hoffmann, it was thought that LSD was not only a psychedelic drug (a word coined in 1957 by H. Osmond to describe an appropriate name for a drug which "enriched" the mind and "enlarged" the vision--the word psychedelic comes from the Greek words for mind and "showing") but a psycholytic drug that would be helpful in therapy. It was at first thought that, if properly applied to patients, it could "loosen up" the emotional blockages which inhibited therapy. I doubt if you could find many proponents of this kind of therapy today.... By the way, LSD got its name (if you ever needed to know), because Hoffman and his associate had been working in the early 1940s on a series of compounds in the lysergic acid series. LSD was originally known as LSD-25, the 25th such compound they had synthesized.

While we are on the subject of a lytic rather than lysis, it might be helpful to give one word used in the 2001 kids National Spelling Bee: anxiolytic. The word only appears in the Unabridged, and it means pretty much what you would expect: it is a drug that helps to "loosen" or dissipate anxiety. I don't know when the word was coined, but it seems that it goes hand in hand with the DSM--that is, whenever the term "anxiety disorder" caught on in American psychiatry, the drug companies with their anxiolytics couldn't be far behind.

Moving to Other "Lysis" Words

As mentioned above, there are more than 66 words in English ending in lysis. Here are a few of the more popular ones: cytolysis, plasmolysis, onycholysis, hemolysis, hemodialysis, homolysis, heterolysis, histolysis, pyrolosis, and lipolysis. I chuckled when I saw the word psephoanalysis on the list, because this virtually unattested word is used by no one but does have in it another root (psephos) frequently occurring in spelling bees. A psephos was a pebble in ancient Greek, a pebble used for indicating your voting preference. Thus, psephology, a perfectly good English word, is the study of election returns. Psephoanalysis would be an (unnecessarily repetitive) synonym for psepholgy. Let me mention in passing that I plan to devote an essay to silent letters from classical roots, and psephology is one that silences the original "p."

Let's close by explaining two of these words. Onycholysis is a nail disorder frequently encountered by dermatologists. The linked page will tell you all about the problem and what you can do to "solve it." Literally onycholysis is something that destroys nails. But I wanted to pause on this word for a second because of the onycho root. The Greek word for nail is onyx (from which we, interestingly enough, get the word for the gem), and we have at least 20 or so words in English built on that root. Someone who bites his/her nails is an onychophagist, for example. I think if my mother had called me that in the 1950s, I would have stopped the habit...The Latin word for nail is unguis, and we also have a host of words beginning with that prefix, such as unguligrade (something that walks--gradus--on the tips of its digits) and ungulate, a word to describe quadrupeds with hoofs.

Finishing wth Cytolysis

I could go on at great length just on "lysis"-words, but we will meet most of the other roots as we move onto other topics. Let's conclude with cytolysis, which is the dissolution or destruction of cells (the Greek word kutos means a hollow or receptacle, but it was taken over by 19th century biologists to mean "cell"). The numbers of cyto-related words are immense. Let's get to those, in due time. This is enough for one day.

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