Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Mysticete
/ˈmɪstɪsiːt/noun
Any whale that filters its food through baleen rather than catching it with teeth.
The Greek roots
μύσταξ
mýstax
moustache, upper lip
κῆτος
kêtos
sea monster, whale
Literally: “moustache whale”
The story of the word
The name points at the fringed plates hanging from the upper jaw, a moustache on a whale. The form owes something to an accident: Aristotle's phrase for a large whale is generally thought to have been garbled in transmission, and the nineteenth-century zoologists who formalised Mysticeti inherited the error along with the moustache. Nothing mystical is involved, despite the spelling.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
cetaceancetologybaleenodontocete
In a sentence
Every mysticete on the survey was a humpback except one fin whale off the headland.
Mysticetes and toothed whales split more than thirty million years ago.