Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Clade
/kleɪd/noun
An ancestor together with every one of its descendants, treated as a single group.
The Greek roots
κλάδος
kládos
branch, shoot
Literally: “branch”
Follow a root:κλάδος2 words
The story of the word
Julian Huxley introduced the term in 1957, and the metaphor does real work: a clade is a branch you could cut from the tree of life in one clean stroke. Groups that fail the test have names biologists now use carefully, since reptiles without birds is a branch with a piece sawn off. Greek κλάδος was the everyday word for a pruned shoot or an olive branch carried by suppliants.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1957
Same family
cladisticscladogramcladode
In a sentence
Birds sit inside the dinosaur clade, which is why the textbooks were rewritten.