# Greek: Scapula



## panjabigator

This is a very odd request, I confess, but I was very curious to what the greek word for scapula was this morning in class.  My teacher said that the greek root "omo" means scapula, so I would like to know what the modern greek word is.

By the way, if you do not know what a scapula.


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## ireney

panjabigator I am not sure what your teacher meant!

The Greek word for scapula is ωμοπλάτη  (omoplati). It's made up from two words ώμος (omos) and πλάτη (plati). The first one means "shoulder" and the second one "back" (the upper back part of the human body for instance, the wide part if you wish).

The omo part has nothing to do with "homo" as in homogenious. 

Ώμος  (shoulder), as my dictionary informs me, comes from the Hindoeuorpean route  *om-so same as aramaic us, latin umerus, sanskrit amsa (can't do the accents), gothic ams, tohaic antse etc.

I won't go into the second one's etymology since that's probably of no interest to you 

So, you see why I can't understand what your teacher meant?


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## Flaminius

Scapula once meant shoulder in Latin.  Therefore, it is safe to say that Latin _scapula_ and Greek  Ώμος meant the same thing.


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## ireney

Flaminius what confused me was that the teacher spoke of the root "omo". I just don't understand to what exactly panjabigator's teacher meant.


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## panjabigator

ireney said:


> Flaminius what confused me was that the teacher spoke of the root "omo". I just don't understand to what exactly panjabigator's teacher meant.



Sorry Ireney, maybe I should give more context in future  It is an anatomy class, and my teacher was talking about the attachment of some muscle (no clue which one unfortunately...need to study!) on the scapula.  The muscle had the word omo-whatever as a name, and he sometimes talks about the reason behind the name.  Sometimes they are bad names, such as the muscle aponeurosis, which has nothing to do with nervous tissue at all.  Instead, it means flat tendon, so as you can see, there is no correlation with the name.  On the other hand, omo-whatever states that a portion of the muscle originates on the scapula.  He said that the greek for Scapula is Omo, and I took that to be the ancient Greek root.  I wanted to know the current Greek word, that's all  Thanks for the info!

I don't know how you got confused with homo- and such.


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## ireney

Ah! Now I get it 

Last things first, I didn't confuse it with homo-. That was just a note.

The word Omos is ancient Greek. The root of it in in IE. You probably got it from the Ancient Greek though. Modern Greek is different from ancient Greek but we haven't changed _everything_ you know  

As for Aponeurosis. Well, neuron means/meant sinew too


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