lung
Plurallungs
- 1A breathing organ in vertebrates that takes in air and adds oxygen to the blood.
Surgeons removed part of the patient's left lung.
Years of smoking had scarred both of his lungs.
Note
The organ is named for its lightness. Old English lungen goes back to a Germanic word for "the light organ," from the same Indo-European root that gave English light. Lungs come in pairs, and the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide happens across the thin walls of the alveoli. The everyday idiom is at the top of one's lungs, which Joseph C. Lincoln's Mr. Pratt's Patients (1913) uses for a shouted "Ahoy!"
- 2The breathing power that lets someone sustain exercise or physical effort.
The veteran climber still had the lung for steep trails at high altitude.
Opera performers train for years to build powerful lungs.
Similarwind, stamina, breath, endurance
Note
As a figure of speech the word is mostly plural: someone has the lungs for something, or the lungs to do it, as in a player who no longer has the lungs to play long rallies. The phrase treats breath as a reserve that can run low, so it suits talk of aging athletes and long, sustained efforts. It extends the breathing organ to the stamina that organ supplies.
- 3An area of trees, parkland, or forest that supplies a place with fresh air and oxygen.
Planners protected the old woodland as the city's last remaining lung.
Tropical rainforests are often called the lungs of the Earth.
Note
A metaphor borrowed from the breathing organ: green space pictured as what lets a crowded place breathe. H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) still wraps the word in inverted commas when it calls Barnes, Wimbledon, Richmond Park and Kew the South-Western "lungs". That punctuation suggests the figure still felt new. Today it usually takes a possessive, as in a city's lung or the lungs of the Earth.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English lunge, from Old English lungen, from Proto-Germanic *lunganjō, ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning "light" (not heavy): the lung was seen as "the light organ." It is related to German Lunge, Dutch long, and the Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic words for lung, as well as Ancient Greek elaphrós ("light in weight") and perhaps Albanian lungë ("blister, bulge").