metastasis

Metastasis comes from Greek μετάστασις, romanized metastasis. In Classical Greek it meant a removal, migration, change of place, or transfer. The noun is built from meta-, meaning "after" or "change," and stasis, meaning "standing" or "position." At the start, the word described movement from one state or place to another.

Greek medical writers gave the term a technical life early on. In Hippocratic and later medical Greek, metastasis could refer to a transfer of disease or symptoms from one part of the body to another. That was still broader than the modern cancer sense. The core idea remained displacement.

From Greek, the word passed into learned Latin as metastasis and then into French and English medical usage. English records appear in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in learned medicine. For centuries the term could describe a shift, transference, or sudden change in disease. Only later did it narrow sharply in oncology.

In modern medicine, metastasis usually means the spread of malignant cells from a primary tumor to distant sites. That specialized sense became dominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as cancer pathology grew more precise. The ancient picture of transfer still sits plainly inside the modern definition. The word has changed less than its clinical setting.