Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Halophyte
/ˈhæləfaɪt/noun
A plant that grows in salty ground or seawater without being poisoned by it.
The Greek roots
ἅλς
háls
salt, the sea
φυτόν
phytón
plant, thing grown
Literally: “salt plant”
The story of the word
ἅλς is both salt and the sea, so a Greek could say he had sailed the salt without straining the language at all. Halophytes hold the ground where ordinary plants die: glasswort, sea aster, mangroves, all of them handling sodium at concentrations that would finish a bean plant in a day. Chemists named the halogens from the same root, salt-formers, while they were still arguing about what chlorine actually was, and halite is rock salt.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
halogenhalidehalophilexerophyte
In a sentence
Saltmarsh restoration begins with the halophytes and lets everything else follow.
Farmers on the delta are trialling halophytes on land the sea has already taken.