Genera

How to spell genera

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce genera

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does genera mean?

1. nounThe plural of genus: the taxonomic categories ranking above species and below family in biological classification.

Genera in a sentence

• The textbook lists several closely related genera within the same plant family.

• Botanists have reclassified many of these genera after studying their DNA.

Where does genera come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word is the Latin plural of genus, which meant 'birth', 'race', 'kind', or 'class', and which traces back to the Indo-European root gen-, meaning 'to give birth' or 'to beget'. That same ancient root produced a remarkable family of English words including 'generate', 'gene', 'genus', 'kin', and even 'nature'. In Latin the noun genus formed its plural irregularly as genera, keeping the -er- that appears in its stem genus/generis, which is why the plural is not simply 'genuses'. Scientists adopted genus in the 1600s as a formal rank of biological classification above species, and they carried the original Latin plural along with it. The spelling trap for adults is precisely this irregular shift: the singular genus has a 'u', but the plural genera drops it and inserts the stem vowels, giving gen-er-a.

How the word is built

• gener- (from Latin genus: birth, kind, class)
• -a (Latin neuter plural ending)