Word of the Day
endorphin
Endorphin
English (from endogenous + morphine)
English pronunciation/ɛnˈdɔːrfɪn/
“The word is a contraction of 'endogenous morphine' — your body's own opiate, produced without a prescription and without a poppy field.”
Endorphin was coined in 1975 by combining 'endogenous' (produced within the body) and 'morphine' (the opiate painkiller). The word names what the molecule is: morphine that the body makes itself. Rabi Simantov and Solomon Snyder at Johns Hopkins, along with John Hughes and Hans Kosterlitz in Aberdeen, Scotland, independently discovered endogenous opioid peptides in the mid-1970s. Hughes and Kosterlitz initially called their discovery 'enkephalin' (in the brain). The broader class of such molecules became 'endorphins.'
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