Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Megakaryocyte
/ˌmɛɡəˈkæriəsaɪt/noun
A giant bone-marrow cell that sheds fragments of itself into the blood as platelets.
The Greek roots
μέγας
mégas
great, large
κάρυον
káryon
nut, kernel
κύτος
kýtos
hollow vessel
Literally: “big-kernel cell”
The story of the word
The name is a description under the microscope: a huge cell with an enormous lobed nucleus, named in the 1890s before anyone knew what it did. κάρυον meant a walnut, and biologists took it for the nucleus, which is why the word for a cell with a proper nucleus is eukaryote, good-kernel. κύτος was a hollow jar, borrowed for the cell itself and now everywhere from cytology to leukocyte.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
eukaryoteleukocytemegaphonecytoplasm
In a sentence
One megakaryocyte can release thousands of platelets before it is spent.