Earth & SkyGreek → English
Benthic
/ˈbɛnθɪk/adjective
Living on or in the bottom of a sea or lake.
The Greek roots
βένθος
bénthos
depths of the sea
Literally: “of the sea depths”
Follow a root:βένθος1 word
The story of the word
βένθος is Homer's poetic form of βάθος, the deep. Ernst Haeckel put it to work in the 1890s as the opposite number to plankton, the drifters: benthos is everything that lives on the bottom or burrows into it. The two are not separate animals so much as separate ages, since a benthic crab spends its first weeks as a planktonic larva.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1890s
Same family
benthosmacrobenthosbathymetry
In a sentence
Trawling wrecks benthic communities that take decades to rebuild.
The survey counted eleven benthic species in a square metre of mud.