ergon

Meaning

Noun

• Work, measured in terms of the quantity of heat to which it is equivalent.
• A task or function of a creature.

Origin

• Borrowed from Ancient Greek ἔργον. work.
• In philosophy, the word is loaned in its capacity as a technical term in Aristotelianism, in English usage following Alexander Grant, The Ethics of Aristotle (1857).
• In classical thermodynamics, the term is coined as translating German Werk. Rudolf Clausius (1864) made a technical distinction between and Arbeit, both translating to English "work", and suggested for the purposes of the translation of his terminology into other modern languages.