Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Embryo
/ˈɛmbrioʊ/noun
An unborn animal or plant in its earliest stage of development.
The Greek roots
ἐν
en
in, within
βρύειν
brýein
to swell, to teem
Literally: “swelling within”
The story of the word
The verb βρύειν describes a bud about to burst, so ἔμβρυον is the thing swelling inside. In classical Greek it usually meant a newborn lamb, the young animal itself rather than the unborn one. Medieval Latin narrowed it to the unborn stage, and English took that sense around 1400. Embryology had to wait another four hundred years for lenses good enough to justify it.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 15th century
Same family
embryonicembryology
In a sentence
At six weeks the embryo is the size of a lentil and already has a beating tube.