Various disciplines in the animal, dairy and poultry sciences have long had an interest in fecal matter, trying to elucidate what an animal has digested, which microbes are present and in which quantities as well as other general measures of an animal's metabolic status.

On the human side, medical researchers pose similar questions.

Researchers at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and at Notre Dame University have now coined a new scientific name for the study of "excrement examined experimentally": in fimo (to go along with in vitro, in vivo and in sacco).

According to the University of North Carolina, a scientifically accurate term based in Latin for the study of feces was needed because many scientific words are based in Latin, and there hasn't been one for the experimental study of excrement, even though the scientific study of waste is now at the forefront of biomedical research.

For instance, when the bacterial composition of the gut is out of balance, the results can range from the mildly unpleasant to rather serious, the researchers said. Studying these bacteria has become extremely important, but when discussing this work in scientific papers, researchers have not been as accurate in their terminology as scientists could be.

When Aadra Bhatt, assistant professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, realized the need for a proper term, she set out to find one and enlisted the help of Luca Grillo, a classics professor at Notre Dame, to help investigate the Latin roots of the word "manure." There were no fewer than four Latin terms: laetamen, merda, stercus and fimus.

According to Bhatt and Grillo, Romans used the term fimus less than stercus, and fimus seemed to refer strictly to the use of manure in agriculture, but the Roman writers Virgil, Livy and Tacitus used fimus and never stercus.

"Fimus, then, with its technical accuracy and literary ring, made us opt for 'in fimo' as our scientific term of choice for the experimental examination of excrement," Bhatt said.

Some might ask why not just use "fecal" or "in feco," but Grillo said both terms are wrong. "Faex never meant 'excrement' in Latin, and its derivative, 'feces,' did not enter English usage until the 17th century, when it first referred to the dregs at the bottom of a wine cask or other storage vessels," Grillo explained.