The morphology of synapses

The word synapse was coined by Sir Charles Sherrington, in 1897, to denote the normal anatomical relation between contiguous neurons (see Foster & Sherrington, 1897). In a footnote in his textbook The Physiology of the Nervous System (Fulton, 1938, p. 55), Fulton reports that he had writ ten to Sherr ington to ask him about the origin of the word synapse and that in reply Sherrington had explained that when he came to describe the junction between nerve cells he felt the need of a specific new term, because the junction had recently acquired physiological significance ( through the ascendance of the Neuron Doctrine unde r the impact of Cajal's impressive evidence). When he asked his senior author (Michael Foster) for an opinion on the term syndesm that Sherrington had in mind, Foster consulted his friend Verrall, a Euripidean scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, who proposed synapse, because it would yield a better adjectival form. Actually the word that Sherrington in t roduced in the third volume of Foster's Textbook of Physiology (1897) was synapsis, but despite his avowed 'need ' for the term, he used it only a few times in the book. As synapsis is a Greek work, the plural would be synapses, from which the Anglicized singular synapse readily derived. By 1906, when the Silliman Lectures that Sherrington gave at Yale Universi ty 2 years earlier, were published, he was using the term synapse and that became the established form (Sherrington, 1906). Sherrington's concept of the synapse is concisely summarized on pp. 60 and 61 of The Textbook of Physiology (Vol. 3, Foster & Sherrington, 1897):