Embryo

How to spell embryo

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce embryo

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does embryo mean?

1. nounAn organism in the earliest stage of development, before birth or hatching.

Embryo in a sentence

• The clinic froze each embryo for later use in the treatment.

• Under the microscope the researcher could see the tiny embryo beginning to form.

Where does embryo come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek embryon, the term for an unborn or newly formed young creature still developing inside the body. That noun was built from en, meaning 'in' or 'within', and the verb bryein, meaning 'to swell' or 'to grow', so the literal sense was 'something growing inside'. It passed into medieval Latin as embryo and reached English in the late 1300s, at first chiefly in medical and scientific writing about the earliest stage of a developing organism. The same en- prefix shifted to em- before the b sound, which is exactly why the word begins emb- rather than enb-, a small spelling clue worth remembering. The modern figurative use, as in 'in embryo' for something still in its earliest form, grew directly out of that original biological meaning.

How the word is built

• em- (en-: in, within)
• bryo (from Greek bryein: to swell, to grow)