Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Oocyte
/ˈoʊəsaɪt/noun
An immature egg cell in the ovary, which becomes an ovum after it completes division.
The Greek roots
ᾠόν
ōión
egg
κύτος
kýtos
hollow vessel
Literally: “egg vessel”
The story of the word
κύτος meant a hollow jar or hull, and nineteenth-century biology drafted it as the standard ending for cell: leukocyte, erythrocyte, cytoplasm, all of them containers. A human female is born with every oocyte she will ever have, arrested mid-division, some of them waiting fifty years to finish. Latin ovum and Greek ᾠόν are cousins, which is why English ended up with both ovary and oocyte.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1890s
Same family
leukocytecytoplasmoologycytology
In a sentence
The clinic retrieved eleven oocytes in the cycle, of which eight were mature.