Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Zygote
/ˈzaɪɡoʊt/noun
The single cell formed when an egg and a sperm fuse.
The Greek roots
ζυγωτός
zygōtós
yoked, joined together
Literally: “the yoked one”
Follow a root:ζυγωτός1 word
The story of the word
ζυγωτός is the participle of yoking, from ζυγόν, the wooden yoke that joins two oxen; the same root gives Latin iugum and English yoke. Biology took the word in the late nineteenth century for the cell made by two gametes fusing, two animals pulling in one harness. Homozygous and heterozygous apply the same image one level down, to the pair of alleles at a site.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
Same family
heterozygoushomozygoussyzygy
In a sentence
Within a day the zygote has divided twice.
Identical twins come from one zygote that split early.