Distoma

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A parasitic flatworm belonging to the fluke group, which lives inside the bodies of animals and humans during part of its life cycle
2. A flat, leaf-shaped internal parasite of the class of trematodes that infects the organs or tissues of vertebrate hosts
3. Any member of the genus Distoma, a fluke-type worm that passes through several hosts and causes disease in the animals it infests

Etymology: Distoma is a New Latin coinage from Greek roots, not a word with a long folk history. It combines "di-", meaning "two", with "stoma", meaning "mouth", and it names a genus of parasitic flatworms (flukes) that have two suckers, one around the mouth and one on the underside. The name thus describes the worm's anatomy in plain terms: two mouths, or two openings used for feeding and attachment. The word was built by naturalists working in the scientific Latin of the 18th and 19th centuries, who drew on classical Greek vocabulary to label newly described animals. Ancient Greek speakers had no concept of these worms, so the term was never used by them. Its meaning stayed fixed to the taxonomic sense, and it survives mainly in parasitology and older zoological writing.