ἠλέκτρον

The Greeks rubbed amber (elektron) with fur and saw it attract light objects. They had no name for the force—it didn't matter then. Centuries later, in 1600, William Gilbert borrowed the Greek word elektron to name this rubbing-force electricity. The amber itself named the phenomenon.

Whewell's 1834 coining of electrode combined elektron (amber) with hodos (way, path). An electrode was the amber's path—the conductor where current enters or leaves. It was a hybrid. Not purely Greek (Gilbert had already Hellenized it) but newly minted for a new purpose.

Electrode did something cathode and anode did not: it named the object itself, not the direction. A cathode is a point, a potential, a direction of flow. An electrode is a material thing—copper, carbon, metal—where current and substance meet. It made electrochemistry concrete.

The device of rubbing amber survived in the word long after people stopped rubbing it. Faraday never touched amber. Edison never touched amber. Every electrochemist in history has used a word that preserves a 2,500-year-old Greek memory: the amber that moved things by invisible force.