Echinos

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Characterized as a spiny or prickly shellfish, often associated with those found in marine environments
2. Describing a type of sea creature known for its round, spiny exterior, usually residing on the ocean floor
3. Referring to marine organisms that display a tough, spiked outer casing, commonly known as sea urchins

Etymology: Ancient Greek "echinos" meant "hedgehog" as well as "sea urchin," and the same word also named a sea-urchin relative, the "sea-hedgehog" connection being literal: the Greeks saw the spiny animal on land and the spiny animal in the sea as one kind of thing. The English form "echinus" was borrowed from Latin "echinus," itself taken from Greek, and it entered scientific use as the name for the sea urchin genus and class. The Greek word is older than its marine use, and its roots are simple. It most likely belongs to a family of words for "spine" or "prickle," and the sense of "sea urchin" is a later extension of the hedgehog meaning rather than a separate coinage. The same Greek noun also gave the architectural term "echinus," the rounded cushion beneath the abacus of a Doric column, which was named for its resemblance to a prickly sea creature's shell. The English word appears mainly in technical writing from the 18th and 19th centuries, when naturalists were systematizing marine life and needed names drawn from classical Greek. Its use in English is therefore a scholarly revival of an ancient word rather than a term that passed through everyday speech.

Synonyms: sea urchins