Getting to Grippe With Influenza: An Investigation of Why the Disease Is Called That

We investigate influenza-related terminology to gain a deeper understanding of what may have driven the choice in disease name when competing options were available. It is unclear why influenza in English should be called “influenza” and not “grippe” as the latter is seemingly the most common term for influenza within Indo-European languages. We examined why influenza is referred to as “influenza” in English using minimum edit distance to determine the available space in a language for a new disease term. We included other European languages for comparison. Available space may part of but not the full reason for why diseases are called what they are called when competing options are available.