The story
Learned borrowing from Ancient Greek πῦρ (pûr, “fire; fever”) + πτῶσῐς (ptôsĭs, “falling”), by analogy with apoptosis. Equivalent to pyro- + ptosis. Coined by Brad T. Cookson and Molly A. Brennan in a 2001 paper in Trends in Microbiology.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.