Endogenes

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Plants belonging to an old botanical group whose stems thicken by growth from within, such as palms, grasses and lilies
2. Members of a former classification of monocotyledonous plants that increase their stem tissue from the inside
3. Flowering plants from a historical division of monocots, characterized by stem growth arising from internal tissue

Etymology: "Endogenes" is the plural of "endogene," a botanical term for a plant whose stem thickens from within rather than by adding rings on the outside, as trees do. The word is built from the Greek prefix "endo-," meaning "within," and the suffix "-gene," from Greek "genes," meaning "born" or "produced." Put together, the literal sense is something like "produced from within." The classification itself is older than the modern word. Monocotyledons such as palms, grasses and lilies were grouped under this idea of inward growth in nineteenth-century botany, and the term stuck as a convenient label for that group. Because the grouping has since been replaced by a more precise scheme based on seed structure, "endogenes" now survives mainly in older textbooks and in discussions of the history of plant classification.