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eurytopic / stenotopic
Mar. 13th, 2013 07:37 ameurytopic (yoor-i-TOP-ik) - adj., (ecol.) tolerating a wide range of environmental conditions or habitats; wide-ranging.
stenotopic (sten-uh-TOP-ik) - adj., (ecol.) tolerating a small range of environmental conditions or changes.
Use of an organism. More or less by definition, animals that thrive in urban environments are eurytopic, though it's possibly to be stenotopic and not be found in a city -- for example, jaguars are highly adaptable but are predators that humans don't tolerate. Both words were coined in the years around 1940, eurytopic slightly before and stenotopic slightly after, from combining forms of Greek roots: eury- from eurýs, wide/broad, steno- from stenós, narrow/close, and -topic from topos, place. Note that these are sometimes misspelled as eurytropic and stenotropic, which makes nonsense of their roots.
---L.
stenotopic (sten-uh-TOP-ik) - adj., (ecol.) tolerating a small range of environmental conditions or changes.
Use of an organism. More or less by definition, animals that thrive in urban environments are eurytopic, though it's possibly to be stenotopic and not be found in a city -- for example, jaguars are highly adaptable but are predators that humans don't tolerate. Both words were coined in the years around 1940, eurytopic slightly before and stenotopic slightly after, from combining forms of Greek roots: eury- from eurýs, wide/broad, steno- from stenós, narrow/close, and -topic from topos, place. Note that these are sometimes misspelled as eurytropic and stenotropic, which makes nonsense of their roots.
---L.
