kairomone

The story

1. Ancient Greek · learned borrowing fromκαιρός“advantage; profit”
2. English todaykairomone

Blend of Ancient Greek καιρός (kairós, “advantage; profit”, noun) + English pheromone, coined in the 1970 article “Allomones and Kairomones: Transspecific Chemical Messengers” by the American geneticist William Lacy Brown, Jr. (1913–1991), the German-American ecologist and entomologist Thomas Eisner (1929–2011), and the American ecologist Robert Harding Whittaker (1920–1980) which was published in BioScience: see the quotation.

Words from the same roots

First known use, by meaning

• from 1970 Any substance produced by an individual of one species (often an insect) that benefits a recipient of a different species but is harmful to the producer.