Japanese schoolgirls wearing masks to prevent spread of influenza, 17 February 1920
22 May 2020
The English name of the disease comes from the Italian influenza, which in turn comes from the Latin verb influere, meaning to flow, and which is the same source of the English word influence. The metaphor underlying the name of the disease is an astrological one, the belief that that stars influenced the course of human events, such as plagues and diseases. But by the time the word reached English in the eighteenth century, that astrological belief was long gone.
In Italian, the word appears by 1363 and originally denoted any epidemic disease. By the late seventeenth century, it was being used specifically for the viral disease we’re familiar with today.
It appears in English by 1743, when the London Magazine reported on an outbreak of the disease in Italy:
News from Rome of a contagious Distemper raging there, call'd the Influenza.
On 5 June 1801, Admiral Horatio Nelson included a note in a dispatch that the disease was present on his flagship:
In the St. George we have got the Influenza.
And Jane Austen used the word in her 1816 novel Emma:
But colds were never so prevalent as they have been this autumn. Mr. Wingfield told me that he had never known them more general or heavy—except when it has been quite an influenza.
The clipped flu appears by 1839 when the poet Robert Southey includes it in a letter of 13 August:
I have had a pretty fair share of the Flue.
Of course, we have all heard of the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 that killed some fifty million worldwide—second only to the Black Death of the fourteenth century in terms of total deaths and the worst in terms of killing the most in the shortest period. The poet Wilfred Owen remarked about it in a letter of 24 June 1918:
About 30 officers are smitten with the Spanish Flu.
Fortunately, the disease has not been so deadly since.
Sources:
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v. influenza, n., flu, n.
Photo credit: Bettman/Getty Images.