Header image of wall of bricks Open menu Close menu

mero-

Partly or partial.

Greek meros, part.

Terms are widely distributed but specialist. A merozoite (Greek zōion, animal, hence ‘partial animal’) is a cell produced by asexual fission, as an intermediate stage in reproduction in some protozoa; meroplankton are aquatic organisms that spend only part of their life cycle as free-swimming plankton; in mathematics, a meromorphic complex function is differentiable except for some singularities, so only partially analytic; a meronym is a term which denotes part of something but which is used to refer to the whole of it, for example faces when used to mean people.

Copyright © Michael Quinion 2008–. All rights reserved. Your comments are very welcome.