A significant portion of my studying (which of course isn’t saying very much, since I can’t focus on studying very well with all these problems) is devoted to figuring out what words mean. Once you get a word, it often saves you the trouble of having to memorize a separate definition.
Today’s focus: “chole,” courtesy of respective Wikipedia articles and Dictionary.com etymologies.
“Chole” is the root meaning “bile.” Therefore, cholic acid is a component of bile. Cholesterol (the alcoholic solid in bile) is so-named because it can precipitate to form a particular type of gallstone (“cholelith”), found amidst the bile stored within the gallbladder.
The gallbladder is a bile-containing pouch and therefore has the prefix “cholecyst-” (where a cyst is an enclosed sac, corresponding to “bladder” in the instances of the bladder, “cyst-” and gallbladder, “cholecyst-“). A cholecystectomy (cutting of the bile-containing sac) is the surgical removal of the gallbladder. The hormone CCK, short for cholecystokinin (movement of the bile-containing sac), is a hormone produced by duodenal and jejunal I cells which is involved in bile let-down from the gallbladder as well as pancreatic enzyme secretion.
However, “cholic” (pertaining to bile) has nothing to do with “colic” (pertaining to the colon). When a person has “colicky” pain, it relates to pain of the colon, not to bile acid.
As an aside, the punctuation mark called the colon (:) is derived from Greek kwlon (omega first) while the organ called the colon is derived from Greek kolon (omicron first). So, they do not have a common etymological root.
