Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Xylem
/ˈzaɪləm/noun
The plant tissue that carries water and dissolved minerals up from the roots.
The Greek roots
ξύλον
xýlon
cut wood, timber
Literally: “wood”
Follow a root:ξύλον4 words
The story of the word
Carl Nägeli cut both xylem and phloem out of Greek in 1858, one from ξύλον, cut wood, the other from φλοιός, bark. The name is literal: in a tree the dead thickened xylem cells are the wood. What runs inside them is a column of water under tension, pulled up by evaporation at the leaves rather than pushed from below, which is how a redwood gets water a hundred metres into the air with no pump.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → German scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
xylophonexylographyxylene
In a sentence
Cut the ring of xylem and the crown dies whatever you do to the roots.