Exoskeleton
/ˌɛksoʊˈskɛlɪtən/noun
A hard external covering that supports and protects an animal's body.
The Greek roots
Literally: “outside dried body”
The story of the word
σκελετός is an adjective, not a noun: dried up, from σκέλλω, to parch. The Greek phrase was σκελετὸν σῶμα, a dried body, and English kept the adjective and threw away the noun, so every skeleton in the language is grammatically a mummy. Richard Owen, the anatomist who also coined dinosaur, set exoskeleton against endoskeleton in the 1840s for what a beetle or a lobster wears on the outside. Engineering borrowed the word back in the twentieth century for powered frames strapped to a human.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
In a sentence
A crab has to abandon its exoskeleton to grow, and spends the next days soft and hiding.
Warehouse trials of the lifting exoskeleton cut back injuries but nobody liked wearing it.