1337: leech Aug 9, 2018

Historically, leeches were an animal that doctors and physicians often used medicinally. In Old English in fact, the word for 'doctor', 'remedy', and 'leech' were all the same: lǣċe. This is only because a word thought to approximate *lēgios was the Proto Indo-European for 'doctor' or 'medicine', and this was then applied to the animal 'leech', as these were a popular type of medicine. Indeed, while similar-sounding words for doctor crop up over lots of these such Indo-European words today, in most Germanic languages and Romanian, the name was applied to the animal.