Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Phloem
/ˈfloʊɛm/noun
The tissue that carries sugars made in the leaves to the rest of a plant.
The Greek roots
φλοιός
phloiós
bark of a tree
Literally: “bark”
Follow a root:φλοιός1 word
The story of the word
Carl Nägeli named it in 1858 from the Greek word for tree bark, because the tissue sits toward the bark side of a stem. He built its partner, xylem, from ξύλον, wood. One moves sugar down, the other water up, and both names record only where a botanist first saw them on a cut surface.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1870
In a sentence
Girdling a trunk kills the tree slowly because it severs the phloem while the xylem keeps working.
Aphids tap straight into the phloem and let the pressure do the feeding for them.