-plasm

Also ‑plasia, ‑plasmic, and ‑plast.

Growth or development; living substance; tissue.

Greek plasis or plasma, formation, from plassein, to shape or mould.

Words in ‑plasm refer to kinds of cell tissue. Examples are cytoplasm, the material within a living cell (excluding the nucleus, whose substance is the nucleoplasm); neoplasm, a new and abnormal growth of tissue in some part of the body, especially as a characteristic of cancer; protoplasm, the colourless material comprising the living part of a cell, including the cytoplasm, nucleus, and other organelles; ectoplasm, either the more viscous, clear outer layer of the cytoplasm in amoeboid cells, or a viscous substance that is supposed to exude from the body of a medium during a spiritualistic trance. Associated adjectives are formed in ‑plasmic: cytoplasmic, ectoplasmic, protoplasmic.

The ending ‑plasia forms names for types of cell growth, mostly abnormal. Examples include dysplasia (Greek dus‑, bad or difficult), abnormal growth or development of skin, bone, or other tissues; hyperplasia (Greek huper, over, beyond), the increased production and growth of normal cells in a tissue or organ; neoplasia (Greek neos, new), the presence or formation of new, abnormal growth of tissue; aplasia (Greek a‑, not or without), the failure of an organ or tissue to develop or to function normally.

The ‑plast ending refers to components of cells, mostly in plants, such as plastids (from the same Greek root), members of a class of small organelles in the cytoplasm of plant cells, containing pigment or food. Examples include chloroplast (Greek khlōros, green), a plastid in green plant cells which contains chlorophyll and in which photosynthesis takes place; protoplast (Greek prōtos, first), the protoplasm of a living plant or bacterial cell whose cell wall has been removed; kinetoplast, a mass of mitochondrial DNA lying close to the nucleus in some flagellate protozoa; tonoplast (Greek tonos, tension, tone), a membrane which bounds the chief vacuole of a plant cell.