Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Protozoan
/ˌproʊtəˈzoʊən/noun
A single-celled organism with a nucleus, such as an amoeba or a paramecium.
The Greek roots
πρῶτος
prôtos
first
ζῷον
zôion
living thing, animal
Literally: “first animal”
The story of the word
Georg Goldfuss coined Protozoa in 1818 for what he took to be the lowest and earliest animals, a first rung on a ladder that climbed to humans. Modern genetics dismantled the group: the creatures inside it are not one branch of life but several distant ones, and the word survives as a convenience rather than a category. ζῷον also gives the zoo, short for zoological garden, and the zodiac, the circle of animals in the sky.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
zoologyzodiacmetazoanprototypeprotagonist
In a sentence
Malaria is caused by a protozoan, not a bacterium, which is why antibiotics do nothing for it.