INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC VOCABULARY

INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC VOCABULARY. As used by Philip Gove, editor, Webster's Third New International Dictionary, 1961. A term for the classically derived vocabulary of science common to such languages as English, French, and Spanish. In Webster's Third, the letters ISV mark words ‘when their language of origin is not positively ascertainable but they are known to be current in at least one language other than English. … Some ISV words (like haploid) have been created by taking a word with a rather general and simple meaning from one of the languages of antiquity, usually Latin and Greek, and conferring upon it a very specific and complicated meaning for the purposes of modern scientific discourse.’ Typically an ISV word is a compound or a derivative which ‘gets only its raw materials, so to speak, from antiquity’. Compare CLASSICAL COMPOUND, COMBINING FORM.