Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Cephalopod
/ˈsɛfələpɑːd/noun
Any of the marine molluscs including octopuses, squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses.
The Greek roots
κεφαλή
kephalḗ
head
πούς
poús
foot
Literally: “head-foot”
The story of the word
Molluscs are built around a muscular foot; in a snail it crawls, and in these animals it has migrated to the head and split into arms. Cuvier named the class in French in the 1790s on exactly that observation, and English had the singular by the 1830s. Aristotle had already grouped them accurately as μαλάκια, the soft ones, and described the octopus changing colour.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 1830s
Same family
octopusencephalitispodiumtripodantipodes
In a sentence
No cephalopod lives long, which makes their intelligence harder to explain.