Taxonomy

How to spell taxonomy

8 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce taxonomy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does taxonomy mean?

1. nounThe science or practice of classifying things into ordered groups, or a particular scheme of such categories.

Taxonomy in a sentence

• The museum uses a strict taxonomy to sort every specimen by species and family.

• Our content team built a clear taxonomy so customers can browse products by category.

Where does taxonomy come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word was assembled from two Greek elements: taxis, meaning 'arrangement' or 'orderly placing', and nomos, meaning 'law' or 'governing method', so the literal sense is roughly 'the rules for arranging things'. It did not come straight from ancient Greece, however; it was deliberately coined in French as taxonomie by the Swiss botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle around 1813, who needed a word for the principles of classifying plants. English borrowed the term soon after, in the early nineteenth century, and it quickly broadened beyond botany to cover the orderly classification of living things in general. In modern use it has spread again to mean any structured scheme of categories, from library cataloguing to the labelled groupings used in business and computing. The 'x' that trips writers up is the original Greek taxis showing through, while the ending is the same -nomy that appears in 'astronomy' and 'economy', both of which also carry that idea of a governing system or method.

How the word is built

• taxo- (from Greek taxis: arrangement, order)
• -nomy (from Greek nomos: law, method of management)