Number & MeasureGreek → English
Cone
/koʊn/noun
A solid tapering from a circular base to a point, or the seed-bearing structure of a pine.
The Greek roots
κῶνος
kônos
pine cone; peak of a helmet
Literally: “pine cone”
Follow a root:κῶνος1 word
The story of the word
Kônos was the pine cone first and the geometric solid second, and it also named the peak of a helmet that held the crest. Apollonius of Perga wrote eight books on conic sections around 200 BC, working out the ellipse, parabola and hyperbola long before anyone needed them for planetary orbits. Conifer is Latin for cone-bearing. The cone cells of the eye were named in the nineteenth century for their taper, and the ice cream cone showed up at fairgrounds around 1904.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
conicconiferconoid
In a sentence
The volume of a cone is a third of the cylinder that would hold it.