www.alphadictionary.com

From the INYT comes yet another end-of-year piece on the words of the year:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/opini ... -2013.html

As a non-user of social media, several of these are unknown to me. Interesting enough, however.

Can anyone explain the usage of "cis" here, though? It does not make sense to me.

According to Wikipedia:

Cisgender has its origin in the Latin-derived prefix cis-, meaning "on this side of," which is an antonym for the Latin-derived prefix trans-, meaning "across from" or "on the other side of". This usage can be seen in the cis-trans distinction in chemistry, the cis-trans or complementation test in genetics, and in the ancient Roman term Cisalpine Gaul (i.e., "Gaul on this side of the Alps"). In the case of gender, cis- is used to refer to the alignment of gender identity with assigned sex.

I couldn't find "cis-" in any of the chemistry glossaries linked to this site, but it does appear to be used in genetics. But if you can understand the following, chapeau


The term proposed by Haldane (1941), by analogy with chemical isomerism, to describe a double heterozygote in coupling phase, that is, with the two dominant factors derived from one parent and the two recessives from the other. The term is used chiefly for closely linked mutants, to which it was first applied by Pontecorvo (1950). The cis configuration for two recessive mutants, 1 and 2, is +/1+/2, where + stands for the wild-type, and the line separates the contributions from the two parents. In molecular biology refers to an effect on a gene directed by the sequence of that gene in contrast to trans effects which are produced by other factors such as transcription factors encoded by other genes. The terms are commonly used to describe factors that influence gene expression. (Cf. trans.)

My bad on cis. I misremembered my own earlier post and got it backwards.

Now it makes sense.

bnjtokyo: your chapeau is safe in its place.