Chordate
/ˈkɔːrdeɪt/noun
An animal of the phylum that has a notochord at some stage of its life, including all vertebrates.
The Greek roots
Literally: “gut string”
The story of the word
Χορδή is a gut, specifically an animal gut dried into a string, which is what lyre strings and later violin strings were actually made from. Balfour named the phylum Chordata in 1880 for the notochord, the stiff rod along the back that every member grows at some point, including the tadpole-shaped larva of the sea squirt and, for a few weeks, you. Chord and cord both come down from the same gut, one through music and one through rope.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1880s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
A sea squirt is a chordate, which is hard to believe looking at the adult.
All vertebrates are chordates; not all chordates are vertebrates.