Breath, exhalation, or vapor; in medicine and older texts, the visible or invisible air exhaled from the lungs or produced by fermentation.
Direct from Latin 'halitus' meaning 'breath' or 'exhalation,' from 'halare' (to breathe). The word appears frequently in medieval medical texts discussing humoral theory and disease transmission.
Roman naturalists used 'halitus' to explain how diseases spread—they thought bad breath (literally bad air) carried illness, and this belief persisted until germ theory proved otherwise 1800 years later.
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