Dissecting Scientific Vocabulary

One of the toughest challenges in science is understanding the long, strange vocabulary terms. Science textbooks are full of crazy words like plasmodesmata, thigmotropism and chemiosmotic phosphorylation. It's really hard to learn science effectively when all these weird words are being thrown in your face. How did scientists come up with these words, anyway? Why do they have to be so unfriendly?

Most of the terms you see in science are combinations of word parts. This is especially true with technical terms. Scientists originally coined the terms by putting together word parts from the Greek and Latin languages. For example, the word 'thigmotropism' comes from a combination of two Greek words: thixis, meaning 'touch,' and tropos, meaning 'turning' or 'direction.' Thigmotropism is the word we use to describe the coiling growth patterns that some plants exhibit in response to touch. Think about vining plants like beans, grapevines and the common morning glory. These plants can climb fences and trellises by coiling their shoots around any object that they touch. You might think it strange that a long, weird word like thigmotropism was ever invented. But, imagine if you were a plant biologist trying to describe a morning glory. How would you talk about its coiling growth pattern? 'The morning glory climbs by using… its ability to turn the direction of its vine growth in response to a touch stimulus.' No, that takes too long! If you were a scientist, you would want to invent your own word to describe this concept. Then you could just say, 'The morning glory climbs by using thigmotropism.' That's exactly why scientists invented the word.

Breaking down scientific terms into word parts can help make them easier to understand.

Most scientific terms refer to Greek or Latin roots. But that doesn't mean you have to know Greek and Latin to understand science terminology. Many word parts are familiar to us in the English and other Romance languages. Take the word 'photosynthesis' for example. It comes from the Greek roots photo, syn and thesis. Photo means 'light,' as you probably already knew from other words like photography, photon and photocopy. The word partsyn means 'with' or 'together.' This might seem like a foreign definition to you. But think about familiar words like sympathy, synagogue, synchronize, system and symbiotic - all these words use a form of the Greek root syn to describe a togetherness of something. So, we've got photo and syn; what about the word part thesis? In Greek, this word means 'setting, putting, or placing.' So 'photosynthesis' means 'light-together-putting' or 'putting together with light.' In other words, photosynthesis is the process by which plants put molecules together using the energy they get from sunlight.

Word Parts and Combinations

As you can see, understanding the meaning of science terms is easier when you break them down into smaller components. This might be a good time to remember the three main parts of a word: the root, theprefix and the suffix. A word root is the primary unit of a word. It's often the longest, most central part of the word that carries the most significant meaning. Both prefixes and suffixes can be added to a word root in order to modify its meaning. Prefixes are word parts that appear before a root, like 'un-,' 'in-,' 'dis-,' 're-' and 'a-.' Suffixes are word parts that come after the root, like '-ed,' '-ing,' '-less,' '-ly' and '-ism.' When prefixes and suffixes show up in science words, they work the same way as they do in regular English. For example, the suffix -ism appears in the word 'thigmotropism.' You don't need to know that -ism is a suffix that indicates a noun. You already know plenty of similar 'isms,' like journalism, optimism and tourism. These are all nouns. So, thigmotropism must also be a noun, even if we're not yet sure what it means.

Try to build connections between words that you already know and words you're just learning. You'll start to get a sense of what the word parts mean, and then you can apply them to other words. For example, the word 'sympetalous' is used to describe a type of flower. Can you figure out what it means? Well, we know that flowers have petals, and we just learned that 'syn' or 'sym' means 'together.' It shouldn't surprise you to learn that 'sympetalous' describes a flower in which the petals are joined together.