Earth & SkyGreek → English
Pelagic
/pəˈlædʒɪk/adjective
Living in or relating to the open water of the sea rather than the coast or the seabed.
The Greek roots
πέλαγος
pélagos
open sea
Literally: “of the open sea”
Follow a root:πέλαγος3 words
The story of the word
πέλαγος is the water away from land, exactly the water a Greek captain spent his career trying to avoid. Biologists use it for everything that lives suspended in the water column, from plankton to blue whales, as against the creatures on the bottom. The word hides inside archipelago: Italian arcipelago first meant the Aegean itself, the chief sea, and only later transferred to the islands scattered across it.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1650s
Same family
archipelagobathypelagicepipelagic
In a sentence
Tuna are pelagic, which is why nobody catches them from a pier.
The survey covered pelagic species only, so the crabs were ignored.