Did You Know?
"Biodiversity may become the rallying call for the next decade," wrote David Wake in the journal Science in 1989. Indeed, "biodiversity" is a word you're likely to encounter in writing about ecology and the environment today. But when Wake used it, "biodiversity" was still a relatively new addition to the English language, having first appeared in writing in the mid-1980s. Of course, the roots of "biodiversity" are much older. It evolved from a commingling of the descendants of the Greek noun "bios," which means "mode of life," and the Latin verb "divertere," which means "to turn aside" or "to go different ways."