Morphic

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Having the quality or property of assuming or relating to a particular shape or form, especially in biological or mathematical contexts
2. Pertaining to the characteristics associated with the transformation or development of shape and form, often in scientific or artistic interpretations
3. Relating to the properties of assuming various shapes or forms, especially within biological or geometrical frameworks

Etymology: Ovid gave the god of dreams a name that meant shape. In the "Metamorphoses", Morpheus is the son of Sleep who can imitate any human form, appearing to sleepers in whatever likeness the message requires. His name comes from the Greek "morphē", "form, shape, outward appearance", a word whose deeper origin is unknown. Around 1805 a young German pharmacist's assistant, Friedrich Sertürner, isolated the sleep-bringing alkaloid of opium. In 1817 he named it "Morphium" after Morpheus, which is how a Greek word for shape ended up inside "morphine". The same root gave Greek a whole family of form-words, most famously "metamorphōsis", a change of shape. Modern scholars kept building with it. Goethe coined "Morphologie" at the end of the eighteenth century for the study of the forms of plants and animals, and English took up "morphology" in the early nineteenth. Through that century, scientists assembled compounds ending in "-morphic" from Greek parts: "anthropomorphic" for things given human shape, "polymorphic" for things that take many forms, "isomorphic" for things that share one. Morphic itself is an English construction: "morph", the shape-root, plus "-ic", the adjective ending that came into English from Latin "-icus" by way of Old French and Middle English. The Latin ending was the counterpart of Greek "-ikos", so the word is a Greek idea dressed in a suffix that reached English through Latin and French. As a standalone adjective it is rare. Most of the time the form survives only as the tail of a longer word. Its most famous solo appearance came in 1981. That year the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, in "A New Science of Life", proposed "morphic resonance". This was the idea that once a form has arisen anywhere in nature, its pattern makes the same form easier to arise again, so that nature has a kind of memory of shapes. Mainstream science rejected the hypothesis. The phrase stuck all the same, and for many readers it is the only place they have ever met the word on its own.

Synonyms: formative, structural