Not Committing Barbarisms: Sherrington and the Synapse, 1897

The word synapse first appeared in 1897, in the seventh edition of Michael Foster’s Textbook of Physiology. Foster was assisted in writing the volume on the nervous system by Charles Sherrington, who can be credited with developing and advocating the physiological concept of a synapse. The word itself however, was derived by a Cambridge classicist, Arthur Verrall.