Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Mycology
/maɪˈkɒlədʒi/noun
The branch of biology dealing with fungi.
The Greek roots
μύκης
mýkēs
mushroom, fungus
-λογία
-logía
study of
Literally: “the study of mushrooms”
The story of the word
μύκης was the mushroom you could pick, so the name covers a kingdom by way of its most visible member. Miles Joseph Berkeley put the English study on its feet in the 1830s, describing thousands of species and identifying the organism that destroyed Ireland's potatoes. Fungi were classified as plants until the twentieth century, so mycology spent most of its existence filed under botany.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1830s
Same family
mycorrhizamycosismycotoxin
In a sentence
Her mycology course spends the first week on nothing but spore prints.