Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Rhizome
/ˈraɪzoʊm/noun
A horizontal underground stem that sends out roots and new shoots along its length.
The Greek roots
ῥίζωμα
rhízōma
mass of roots
Literally: “root-mass”
Follow a root:ῥίζωμα1 word
The story of the word
ῥίζωμα is a mass of roots, from ῥίζα. Botanists borrowed it in the nineteenth century for the creeping underground stem, which is a stem and not a root at all, and which is how ginger, iris, bamboo and couch grass conquer ground. Liquorice conceals the same word: γλυκύρριζα, sweet root. Deleuze and Guattari later took rhizome as a model for structures with no centre and no trunk.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
rhizoidliquoricemycorrhizarhizosphere
In a sentence
Pull the bamboo out by hand and you leave the rhizome, which is the only part that matters.