Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Mesoderm
/ˈmɛsədɜːrm/noun
The middle germ layer of an embryo, which becomes muscle, bone, blood and connective tissue.
The Greek roots
μέσος
mésos
middle
δέρμα
dérma
skin, hide
Literally: “middle skin”
The story of the word
Remak established the three-layer plan of the embryo in chick eggs in the 1840s; the Greek labels ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm settled into English a generation later. Skin is a loose translation of what the layer is, since the middle one supplies the heart and the kidneys as well as the dermis. δέρμα comes from δέρειν, to flay, the same verb sitting inside taxidermy.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1870s
Same family
epidermisdermatitisectodermmesolithictaxidermy
In a sentence
The heart arises from mesoderm, the gut lining from endoderm.
She traced each organ in the diagram back to its germ layer.