1337: leech Aug 9, 2018

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Historically, leeches were an animal that doctors and physicians often used medicinally. In Old English in fact, the word for 'doctor', 'remedy', and 'leech' were all the same: lǣċe. This is only because a word thought to approximate *lēgios was the Proto Indo-European for 'doctor' or 'medicine', and this was then applied to the animal 'leech', as these were a popular type of medicine. Indeed, while similar-sounding words for doctor crop up over lots of these such Indo-European words today, in most Germanic languages and Romanian, the name was applied to the animal.

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