Dealing With Headaches

Although the origins of why people get migraines is unknown, at least the history of the word migraine can be agreed upon. Today, we will shift our focus from the wacky world of medical science to the even wackier world of etymology (word stuff studies). The source for this article is the brilliant and entertaining etymology for the masses web site Take Our Word For It.

Now, the word “headache” is pretty easy to trace. There’s a head. There’s an ache. There’s a headache. No big whoop. But what about migraine? What part of your body is a “graine”, to make you moan “MY graine!”

The Source of Migraine

The root of “migraine” is from where a lot of head pains have come to us over the millenia — the Latin language. Latin is the Big Daddy language of the Romantic breed of lingos, which include French, Italian, Portugese and Spanish. The Latin term “hemicrania” (not meaning “fear of hems” but “half of the skull”) is in itself taken from Greek hemikrania. The Romans just had to spell it differently, for some reason. (In case you’re wondering, English is grouped in the Germantic breed of languages).

The Latin term “hermicrania” apparantly became too hard to pronounce by those in France suffering from migraines, which apprantly a lot of French did (insert your favorite French joke here). The pronunciation shifted to megrainia and then megraine (which is thought to have been pronounced “me-grin”).

The English version of the French word (which is intself a corruption of the Latin, which was spelled different if not pronuonced the same as the Greek hemikrania) was first recorded as megrim (which makes a much more senisble name thatn migraine, in my opinion) in the late 14th century (1300’s, for those of you slow on math — like me!) At that time, the French was still all over the place in England’s upper classes and had a profound effect on the lingo.

For some reason unknown — perhaps it fell into the bottom of the Marianas Trench, who knows — the word megrim disappeared from the mouths of English speakers in the17th century (1600’s) and was instead replaced with the French word, which we all know and love, migraine. The official word for those suffering from migraines is “migraineurs”, which I rarely use in this blog for two reasons. One, I don’t know how to pronounce it and two, I can’t be bothered to look up how to pronounce it since the word is used so little. I don’t get paid THAT much for writing this blog.

As a note about pronunciation, in America, it is pronounced “MY grain”. In England, Australia and often in Canada, it is pronounced “ME grain”. But getting into the reasons for that might trigger a migraine (or me-graine) in us all, so I’ll stop.

Hope this helps. Have a pain-free weekend.