Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Nematode
/ˈnɛmətoʊd/noun
An unsegmented roundworm, free-living in soil and water or parasitic in plants and animals.
The Greek roots
νῆμα
nêma
thread
εἶδος
eîdos
form, likeness
Literally: “thread-shaped”
The story of the word
Karl Rudolphi grouped them as Nematoidea in 1808, naming them for the obvious thing about them under a lens: a smooth thread, tapered at both ends, with none of the rings of an earthworm. They are the most numerous animals on Earth by individual count, dense enough in soil that one biologist imagined every other object dissolving and the world still visible as a ghost of worms. The same νῆμα names the nematocyst, the coiled thread a jellyfish fires into skin.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
nematocystnematology
In a sentence
The lab keeps thousands of nematodes on agar plates for genetics work.