Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Organism
/ˈɔrɡənɪzəm/noun
Any individual living thing, from a bacterium to a whale.
The Greek roots
ὄργανον
órganon
instrument, tool
Literally: “a thing made of instruments”
Follow a root:ὄργανον5 words
The story of the word
The word came in from French organisme in the 1660s meaning organised structure, an arrangement of parts, with no requirement that it be alive. The modern sense of a single living being dates from the 1830s, when biology needed one word covering animals, plants and everything too small to see. A machine sits under the metaphor: ὄργανον is a tool, so an organism is a body of tools working together.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 1660s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
organorganicorganizeergonomics
In a sentence
A single organism can carry thousands of species of bacteria.
The reef behaves like one organism when the water warms.