Chytrids

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Microscopic aquatic fungi that produce motile spores with a single whip-like flagellum and often cause disease in amphibians
2. Single-celled fungal organisms living in water or moist soil, several kinds of which are parasites of frogs and other animals
3. Members of a primitive group of fungi whose swimming spores set them apart from most other fungal lineages and which include amphibian pathogens

Etymology: "Chytrids" is the plural of "chytrid", a name for a group of tiny, mostly aquatic fungi. The singular "chytrid" comes from Ancient Greek "khutrídion", meaning "little pot", a diminutive of "khútra", the word for an earthen pot or pipkin. The name refers to the organisms' flask-like or pot-shaped structures, which the early observers who named them saw under the microscope. The Greek root was given a Latinate-looking ending, "-id", so that the term would sit neatly alongside other biological family and group names. The result is a scientific coinage built from an ordinary household word. The ancient Greeks would have known "khútra" for cooking vessels, not for fungi, so the link between the pot and the organism is the work of modern taxonomists.