Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Gene
/dʒiːn/noun
A stretch of DNA carrying the instructions for a trait and passing it to the next generation.
The Greek roots
γένος
génos
race, kind, offspring
Literally: “birth-thing”
Follow a root:γένος9 words
The story of the word
Wilhelm Johannsen coined German Gen in 1909 by cutting the front off Hugo de Vries's pangene, which came in turn from Darwin's failed theory of pangenesis. Johannsen wanted a word with no theory attached and said so: a gene was a unit for calculation, and nothing was being claimed about what it was made of. Watson and Crick answered that question forty-four years later.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1911
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
genesisgeneticsgenocidehydrogeneugenics
In a sentence
The gene for lactose tolerance spread through Europe in a few thousand years.