Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Ecosystem
/ˈiːkoʊˌsɪstəm/noun
A community of organisms together with the physical environment they interact with.
The Greek roots
οἶκος
oîkos
house, household
σύστημα
sýstēma
an organised whole
Literally: “the household set together”
The story of the word
Arthur Tansley coined it in 1935, in an argument against the fashion for treating a plant community as a kind of organism. His point was that you cannot separate the creatures from the rocks, water and air they exchange matter with, so the unit of study has to include both. σύστημα is a standing-together, from ἵστημι, and the business world borrowed the whole compound in the 1990s for anything with interdependent parts and a share price.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1935
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
ecologyeconomysystemstatic
In a sentence
A single introduced fish reorganised the whole ecosystem of the lake.