The story
From hetero- + zygote. Coined by English biologists William Bateson and Edith Rebecca Saunders in 1902, in a paper titled "The facts of heredity in the light of Mendel’s discovery".
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
heterozygote
Today it means: A diploid individual that has different alleles at one or more genetic loci. Full definition →