Biodiversity

How to spell biodiversity

12 letters · 6 syllables

How to pronounce biodiversity

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does biodiversity mean?

1. nounThe variety of plant and animal life found in a particular habitat or across the world as a whole.

Biodiversity in a sentence

• The rainforest supports an extraordinary level of biodiversity.

• The new farming policy aims to protect biodiversity along field margins.

Where does biodiversity come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a modern coinage, a blend of the phrase 'biological diversity' that was compressed into a single tidy word in the mid 1980s. The first half, 'bio-', comes from the Greek bios, meaning 'life', the same element found in biology and biography. The second half traces to the Latin diversitas, 'difference' or 'variety', built on divertere, which literally meant 'to turn aside' or 'to turn in different directions'. The contracted form is usually credited to discussions among conservation scientists in the United States around 1985, and it entered wide public use through environmental policy and reporting soon after. Because the word is stitched together from two familiar parts, the spelling trap is mostly the unstressed middle vowels and remembering that the joining 'o' of 'bio' sits cleanly against 'diversity'.

How the word is built

• bio- (life)
• divers- (from Latin divertere: to turn aside, vary)
• -ity (noun-forming suffix)