- 1受精卵、合子（生物學用「合子」，日常講「受精卵」）
A zygote is the single cell that comes into being when a sperm cell joins an egg cell. It is the very first cell of a new living thing, and it holds a full set of instructions — half from each parent. It does not stay a zygote for long: within about a day it starts dividing into two cells, then four, and once it is dividing it gets other names (embryo, and in humans later a fetus). So zygote names a stage, and a short one.
The word is countable: a zygote, two zygotes. It belongs to biology class and to science writing, not to daily talk. If you say it in a normal conversation, it will sound , and about a pregnancy people say 'she's pregnant' or 'the baby', never 'the zygote'.
It is used for plants and animals, not only people — a fertilised seed cell in a flowering plant is a zygote too. In everyday and writing people are loose about the difference between zygote and embryo, but in a biology exam the difference matters: zygote means one cell, before any division.
組成From Ancient Greek zygotos, meaning 'yoked' or 'joined together', plus the ending -ote, which makes a noun meaning 'the thing that has this quality'. Behind it is the Greek word zygon, a yoke — the wooden bar that joins two oxen so they pull together. So a zygote is, in the old picture, two things yoked into one — which is exactly what happens when egg and sperm join.
同家族的字
- zygomaticas in the zygomatic bone, the cheekbone — from the same Greek zygon, because that bone joins two parts of the skull
- yokethe English word for the bar joining two oxen; it and Greek zygon both come from the same very old root meaning 'to join'
- jointhrough Latin iungere, from that same ancient root meaning 'to tie together'
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
zygotenoun/ˈzaɪɡəʊt/
- 1
biologycytologymedicineA eukaryotic cell formed from the fusion of two gametes (“reproductive cells”) during a fertilization process.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。