Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Clone
/kloʊn/noun
An organism or cell genetically identical to the one it came from, or any exact copy.
The Greek roots
κλών
klṓn
twig, shoot for planting
Literally: “twig”
Follow a root:κλών1 word
The story of the word
Herbert J. Webber coined it in 1903, spelled clon, for a group of plants raised from cuttings of one parent. Gardeners had been doing this for thousands of years; the word only gave the practice a name. The final e was added because people kept rhyming it with gone, and both the laboratory and the computing senses grew out of that horticultural one.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1903
Same family
clonalmonoclonalcloning
In a sentence
Every Cavendish banana in the shop is a clone of the same plant.