Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Mycelium
/maɪˈsiːliəm/noun
The branching mass of fine threads that makes up the body of a fungus.
The Greek roots
μύκης
mýkēs
fungus, mushroom
Literally: “fungus growth”
Follow a root:μύκης4 words
The story of the word
Coined in the 1830s for what a fungus actually is, the mushroom being only its fruiting body. The first element is μύκης, fungus; the second is unsettled, with ἧλος, nail or wart, the usual guess and not a confident one. One mycelium of Armillaria in Oregon's Malheur National Forest spreads across roughly nine square kilometres, which makes the honey mushrooms above it a rounding error.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1830s
Same family
mycologymycorrhizamycosismycotoxin
In a sentence
Lift the leaf litter and the white mycelium is everywhere, threaded through the top few centimetres.
The spawn is just mycelium grown on grain.