Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Morphology
/mɔːrˈfɒlədʒi/noun
The study of the form and structure of organisms, or of the forms words take.
The Greek roots
μορφή
morphḗ
shape, outward form
λόγος
lógos
study, account
Literally: “study of form”
The story of the word
Goethe coined German Morphologie in the 1790s while arguing that every part of a flower was a modified leaf, and Karl Friedrich Burdach reached the same word independently around 1800. It stayed a botanist's and anatomist's term for most of a century before linguists borrowed it for the shapes words take. μορφή meant the form a thing shows to the eye, which is why Morpheus, who came to sleepers wearing human shapes, has the name he does.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → German → English
- First recorded
- 1820s
Same family
amorphousmetamorphosisMorpheuspolymorphic
In a sentence
Leaf morphology alone was enough to separate the two populations.
Finnish morphology puts fifteen cases on a single noun.