Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Plankton
/ˈplæŋktən/noun
The small organisms that drift in seas and lakes and feed most of what lives there.
The Greek roots
πλαγκτός
planktós
wandering, drifting
Literally: “that which drifts”
Follow a root:πλαγκτός3 words
The story of the word
Victor Hensen coined it in 1887 for everything a fine tow net brings up, defining the category by how it moves rather than by what it is. Ernst Haeckel supplied the counterpart in 1890: nekton, the swimmers that can beat the current. The Wandering Rocks that Circe warns Odysseus about, the Πλαγκταί, come from the same verb.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1891
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
nektonphytoplanktonzooplankton
In a sentence
The whale surfaced with its mouth open, straining plankton through the baleen.