Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Spermatozoon
/ˌspɜːrmətəˈzoʊɒn/noun
A mature male reproductive cell, propelled by a tail.
The Greek roots
σπέρμα
spérma
seed
ζῷον
zôion
living creature
Literally: “seed animal”
The story of the word
The animal in the name is a mistake preserved in amber. Leeuwenhoek saw the things under his lens in 1677 and called them animalcules, and for a century and a half many naturalists took them for parasites living in semen rather than the agent of fertilisation. Karl Ernst von Baer put the compound into circulation in 1827, the same year he identified the mammalian egg. σπέρμα comes from σπείρειν, to sow, which also scattered the diaspora.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1820s
Same family
spermdiasporazoologyprotozoanspore
In a sentence
Under the microscope a single spermatozoon was still moving, thirty minutes after the sample arrived.