means A state of uncontrollable or exaggerated emotion, panic, or excitement, often spreading through a group; historically (and wrongly) a supposed nervous disorder blamed on the womb.

from Straight from the Greek hystera, 'womb.' Ancient physicians believed the uterus could literally wander around the body causing distress, so 'hysteria' was coined to name a so-called women's affliction. The word entered medical English by the 17th–18th centuries and only later loosened into its modern sense of mass panic or unhinged emotion — the womb-origin now embarrassingly visible in the root.