Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Decapod
/ˈdɛkəpɒd/noun
A crustacean with ten legs, such as a crab, lobster, shrimp or prawn.
The Greek roots
δέκα
déka
ten
πούς
poús
foot
Literally: “ten-footed”
The story of the word
Count a lobster and the ten includes the claws, which are simply the first pair of walking legs turned into weapons. French naturalists of the early nineteenth century built the New Latin order name Decapoda on plain Greek numerals, part of a whole shelf of arthropod groups named by foot count. Steam locomotives with ten driving wheels picked up the same nickname.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → New Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1830s
Same family
isopodcephalopodpodiumdecadetripod
In a sentence
Almost everything on the seafood counter was a decapod of one sort or another.