Ontogenies

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A series of developmental stages an organism goes through from fertilization to maturity
2. The process by which an individual organism develops, showing all changes from embryo to adult
3. The historical sequence of development specific to a particular individual, encompassing all morphological transformations

Etymology: "Ontogenies" is the plural of "ontogeny", so it names several such developmental histories at once, each tracing one organism's path from fertilization to maturity. The noun "ontogeny" is a modern scientific coinage built from two Greek elements: "onto-", from "on" (genitive "ontos"), meaning "being" or "that which exists", and "-geny", from "genesis", meaning "origin" or "birth". Literally it is the origin or birth of a being. The term was formed on the model of German "Ontogenie", which was itself a formation from the same classical building blocks. It belongs to the nineteenth-century vocabulary of biology, when naturalists needed precise names for the developmental history of an individual, as distinct from the history of a species. Its partner word "phylogeny" was coined on the same pattern for the evolutionary history of a lineage, so the two terms are usually set side by side.

Synonyms: developmental processes, growth stages