What are Abs?

The phrase “work your abs." which has been in the title of my last three blog posts,  is short for a workout regimen that focuses on your abdominal muscles. Abdomen, I just realized, is a word I didn’t study in the previous three posts on abs.

In case you’re not aware, the abdominal muscles refer to muscles in the abdomen, the part of the body of a mammal that is between the thorax and the pelvis. It contains the stomach and intestines and other organs. The word abdomen came to English in the 1540s and originally meant “body fat”, something with which I am all too familiar. It came directly from the Latin word except the Latin word has unknown origins. (Maybe they didn’t want to be indiscrete.) It may be that it was formed from the Latin word for conceal, which is abdere, since we have long concealed that part of the body. (Forgotten – by some – fact: as late as 1970 when Barbara Eden’s belly button could not be shown in the last television series filmed in black and white: I Dream of Jeannie.) The word abdomen didn’t develop a purely anatomical sense (as opposed to anything concealed) until the 1610s.

Thorax, one of only three commonly used English words that end in –rax (the others are anthrax and borax), is the part of the body above the abdomen but below the neck. It is the part enclosed by the ribs, sternum and certain vertebrae, and is where the lungs and heart are located. It also comes from Latin, although it came in much earlier, about 1400. The Latin word thorax came from the Greek word thorakos, which is the word for chest or breastplate. Beyond that we have no idea of its origin. Thor wasn’t involved.

The pelvis is actually the cavity in the lower part of your trunk that is formed by various bones: the hip bones, the sacrum and the coccyx. The hip bone is actually formed by three bones, the ilium (which with the sacrum forms the sacroiliac joint), the ischium, and the pubis. The word pelvis came directly from Latin, too. Pelvis is the Latin word for basin, and was apparently used because the hip bones form something that looks like a basin. (Think of that the next time you wash up.)

The sacrum is the triangular bone between the hip bones at the base of the spine. It also came to English directly from Latin, where in Late Latin it was known as the os sacrum, or sacred bone (os meaning bone and sacrum meaning sacred). It is said to be called that because it was the part of animals that was offered in sacrifices because it helped protect the organs of procreation.

The coccyx, or tailbone, is directly below the sacrum and is the other bone in the pelvis. It came to English about 1610 from the Latin word coccyx, which came from the Greek word kokkyx, which got its name because Galen, one of the most famous Roman physican philosophers, thought that the bone was shaped like the beak of the cuckoo, kokkyx being the Greek for cuckoo.  (Think of that the next time you’re coccyx for Cocoa Puffs.)

For you Scrabble fans, coccyx and onyx are the two most common English words that end in yx.