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With the Covid pandemic beginning to subside, we can breathe a little easier & wonder about things like: What does “pandemic” mean, anyway?

Many English words have their roots in ancient Greek and Latin.  “Pandemic” consists of three Greek word-parts:

“pan,” meaning “all,” “every,” “entire”  

“demos” (reduced form “dem”), meaning “people“

“ikos” (Latin form “icus”; early English form “ick” or “ik”), meaning “pertaining to”

As you can see from these roots, the original sense of “pandemic” is something “affecting all people.”  As the word developed, it became associated with diseases spreading across entire populations.  

If you can recognize roots in new vocabulary words you’re hearing or reading, you’ll be able to guess their meanings and remember them longer.  Hundreds of English words include one of these three Greek roots: “pan”, “dem,” and “ic” (modern English form of “ikos”).  

Let’s talk more about “pan” today, and the other two roots of “pandemic” in follow-up posts.

The “all” meaning of “pan” arises when “pan” is a prefix: a word-part appearing at the beginning of words.  Sometimes this prefix is attached with a hyphen, as in “pan-American” or “pan-African.”  In these cases, “pan-” means “affecting all parts of,” “across all of,” or “relating to all people described as.” 

Other words with the prefix “pan” do not feature a hyphen.  Can you guess the meanings of the words below?

panacea (“acea” comes from Greek “akos, akeia,” meaning “cure”)

panorama (“orama” comes from Greek “horama,” meaning “sight, spectacle,” and Greek verb “horan,” meaning “to look, to see”)

pantheon (“theon” comes from Greek “theios,” meaning “of/for the gods,” and “theos,” meaning “god”)

Another cultural & linguistic legacy from ancient Greek is “Pan” (with a capital “P”): a god imagined with a man’s upper body, a goat’s lower parts, and goat-horns on his head!  Embodying nature, Pan was the god of shepherds & herd animals, forests & fields, wild places & rustic music, and was associated with sex, fertility & spring.

“Pan” appears in the word “panic,” originally meaning “pertaining to Pan.”  The ancient Greeks believed Pan made “mysterious sounds that caused contagious, groundless fear in herds and crowds, or in people in lonely spots,” according to Etymonline (see source note below).

Other ancient languages produced “pan” meanings unrelated to Greek (or with complex or less direct connections to Greek), which appear in nouns like “pan” (as in “frying pan,” “pancake”), “panda,” “panache,” and several meanings of the verb “to pan.”  If you’re interested, research the histories of those words on your own!  The etymological notes (very brief word histories) at the end of a dictionary definition can help you learn & remember new vocabulary; etymology is the study of the origins & evolving meanings of words.

SOURCES for information included in this post: Etymonline, the Online Etymology Dictionary (etymonline.com: “pan,” “dēmos,” “ikos” & related entries); English Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org: “Pan (god)” & related entries).

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A version of this article appeared as a post on NYU’s English Language Institute blog on July 8, 2021.