Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Biome
/ˈbaɪoʊm/noun
A large community of plants and animals characteristic of a climate zone.
The Greek roots
βίος
bíos
life
-ωμα
-ōma
mass, formed body
Literally: “the whole body of life”
The story of the word
Frederic Clements introduced biome in 1916 for a living community shaped by its climate: tundra, savanna, temperate forest. The ending was never a suffix in Greek. It came loose from nouns like ῥίζωμα, a mass of root, and then went to work in English meaning the entire body of something. Genome followed in 1920, and proteome and microbiome after it, all children of a suffix that had to be invented by misreading.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1916
Same family
genomemicrobiomerhizomebiology
In a sentence
A single hillside can hold two biomes if the wet side faces the sea.