hippus

Definitions

noun pupillary athetosis; spasmodic dilation and contraction of the pupil between the sphincter and dilator muscles.

Ancient Greek, horse, perhaps due to the rhythm of the contractions representing a galloping horse.

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I did not find a single word in our language closer to this meaning than hippus, even though the Arabic word, unlike the Hebrew hippus, implies not only the examination of a notion but knowledge of the notion examined.

Samuel Ibn Tibbon Robinson, James T. 2006
Wide-open blue eyes with broad pupils, in which I could plainly see the characteristic "hippus" -- that incessant change of size that marks the unstable nervous equilibrium -- parted lips, and wandering taper fingers, were as the stigmata of his disorder.

John Thorndyke's Cases related by Christopher Jervis and edited by R. Austin Freeman 1902
The translation itself, however, uses terms such as hippus that Ibn Tibbon, according to his own testimony (see below), only coined much later, after 1213. 4.

Samuel Ibn Tibbon Robinson, James T. 2006
I say: it seems to me that the philosophers borrowed the Arabic word, which I replace with the Hebrew hippus, from the language of the multitude, who use it to express a notion that resembles what the philosophers intend when they use it.

Samuel Ibn Tibbon Robinson, James T. 2006
Indeed, he has not yet even been named, although we are quite familiar with his attributes; perhaps when his bones are ultimately found-and they will be-a proper name would be -paleohippus, " the hippus of the Paleocene epoch.

Centennial Michener, James 1974