Parasite
/ˈpærəsaɪt/noun
An organism that lives on or in another and takes its living at that host's expense.
The Greek roots
Literally: “beside the food”
The story of the word
Being a parásitos was once a post, not an accusation: the official who ate the sacred grain at the temple beside the priest. Athenian comedy turned him into a stock figure, the flatterer who talks his way onto a rich man's dining couch, and Roman playwrights kept him. English had the insult by the 1530s and only later, in the eighteenth century, let biologists have the word for tapeworms and fleas.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 1530s
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
The wasp lays its eggs inside a caterpillar, which makes it a parasite with poor manners.
Half the syllabus was parasites and the other half was the immune system fighting them.