Organic
/ɔːˈɡænɪk/adjective
Belonging to living bodies, or grown part by part into a single whole rather than assembled.
The Greek roots
Literally: “of a tool or bodily organ”
The story of the word
ὄργανον is a tool, from ἔργον, work, and Aristotle's logical writings were gathered under the title Ὄργανον because logic was held to be the instrument of thought rather than a subject in itself. Chemistry claimed the adjective for compounds got from living bodies, and kept it after Wöhler made urea from ammonium cyanate in 1828 and the wall between living and non-living chemistry stopped standing up. Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright then took it for buildings whose parts grow out of one idea and one site, which is why a Wright house is called organic and a Palladian villa is not.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
The extension is organic in Wright's sense: the stair, the hearth and the roofline all come from the same decision.
Organic here means the plan grew, not that anyone kept the chickens happy.