We are known for bringing you weird words, but this one wins hands down…
First off, hope and pray that nobody ever uses the word in context of yourself or anybody you know. You don’t want a gossypiboma. Furthermore, the fact that the word even exists, make us doubt the efficiency of those in the medical profession and we don’t want to do that…
So, without any further ado, here’s the definition: A surgical sponge left within a patient after an operation.
This has happened so many times that they actually have a word for it?! Scary stuff. One surgeon even described it as ” a memento that we surgeons sometimes accidentally leave behind to commemorate our presence in some poor patient’s abdomen.”
According to online dictionaries it’s an amalgam of words from two languages: Latin 'gossypium', cotton, and Swahili 'boma', meaning a place of concealment. Its earliest use was in an article that appeared in the journal Radiology in November 1978: Gossypiboma: The problem of the retained surgical sponge.
Source: World Wide Words
