Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Tropism
/ˈtroʊpɪzəm/noun
The growth of an organism turning toward or away from a stimulus such as light, gravity or touch.
The Greek roots
τροπή
tropḗ
a turning
Literally: “a turning”
Follow a root:τροπή8 words
The story of the word
The term came out of German plant physiology around 1900 and multiplied at once: phototropism toward light, geotropism along gravity, thigmotropism on contact, which is how a tendril finds a wire. Darwin and his son Francis had done the experiments in 1880, cutting the tips off grass seedlings and showing that the sensing happens somewhere other than the bending. The same τροπή names the tropics, the latitudes where the sun turns back.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → German → English
- First recorded
- around 1900
Same family
tropicheliotropeentropytrophy
In a sentence
The seedlings show a strong tropism toward the window within a day.
He has a tropism for any argument he is likely to lose.