Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Teleost
/ˈtɛliɒst/noun
Any of the bony fishes with a fully ossified skeleton and a symmetrical tail, a group that includes almost all living fish.
The Greek roots
τέλειος
téleios
complete, finished
ὀστέον
ostéon
bone
Literally: “complete bone”
The story of the word
Johannes Müller's classification of 1844 sorted fishes by how far the skeleton had turned to bone, and the teleosts were the ones that had finished the job, as against sharks and rays with their cartilage. The label stuck even though the reasoning was about grade rather than ancestry. Some thirty thousand species are teleosts, from the herring to the seahorse, which makes it hard to find a fish on a plate that is not one.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
osteoporosisosteopathyteleologyperiosteum
In a sentence
Nearly every fish in the market is a teleost.
Teleosts control buoyancy with a swim bladder, which sharks lack entirely.