Biomass

How to spell biomass

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce biomass

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does biomass mean?

1. nounThe total mass of living organisms in a given area, population, or sample.
2. nounOrganic material such as wood, crops, or waste used as a renewable source of energy.

Biomass in a sentence

• The survey measured the total biomass of fish in the reservoir.

• The power station now burns wood pellets and other biomass for electricity.

• Forests store a vast amount of carbon in their plant biomass.

• The farm converts manure and crop residue into biomass for heating.

Where does biomass come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This is a modern scientific compound, built from the Greek bios, meaning 'life' or 'living things', joined to the ordinary English word mass, which itself descends from the Latin massa, a 'lump' or 'kneaded dough', and ultimately the Greek maza, a barley cake. The bio- element is the same one that opens biology, biography, and biosphere, always carrying the sense of living organisms. Ecologists coined biomass in the early twentieth century to name the total weight of living material in a given area or population, a tidy way of measuring 'how much life' something contained. In the energy field the term was extended later, especially from the 1970s onward, to mean plant and animal material burned or converted as a renewable fuel. The spelling is reassuringly transparent: simply bio plus mass, with the double s of mass preserved intact.

How the word is built

• bio- (life, from Greek bios)
• mass (a body of matter, from Latin massa)