Etymology

zooxanthella

Z10O1O1X8A1N1T1H4E1L1L1A1

Today it means: Any of the yellow pigmentary particles, or minute corpuscles of yellow coloring matter, found in certain radiolarians. Full definition →

Ancient Greek ζῷον
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The story

  1. Ancient Greek · derived fromζῷον“animal”
  2. English todayzooxanthella

From (deprecated) genus name Zooxanthella, from Ancient Greek ζῷον (zōîon, “animal”) + ξανθός (xanthós, “yellow”) + -ella.

Words from the same roots

Ancient Greekζῷον all →

zoologyzoonzoonosiszoo-zooecium-zoonzoophagazoothomezootic

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.