Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Heterotroph
/ˈhɛtərəˌtroʊf/noun
An organism that gets its carbon by consuming other organisms, as animals and fungi do.
The Greek roots
ἕτερος
héteros
the other of two
τροφή
trophḗ
nourishment, food
Literally: “fed by another”
The story of the word
Coined as the counterpart to autotroph in turn-of-the-century plant physiology, it quietly defines every animal, including us, as something that cannot feed itself from raw materials. ἕτερος carries a distinction English lost: it means the other of exactly two, where ἄλλος means another out of many. That precision survives in heterosexual and in the chemist's heterogeneous, a mixture of two unlike things.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- around 1900
Same family
autotrophheterogeneousheterodoxatrophy
In a sentence
Fungi are heterotrophs that digest first and absorb afterwards.
Every heterotroph in the cave depends on bat guano falling from the roof.