Meaning & use
phylum
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Meanings
nouncountablebiology
One of the main divisions of the animal kingdom (or of other kingdoms), grouping living things that share the same basic body design.
Grammar: Plural is phyla: one phylum, several phyla.
Patterns
- the phylum of something
- belong to the phylum something
Snails, clams and squid all belong to the same phylum, the mollusks.
Students had to name the phylum of each animal in the photographs.
The phylum Chordata includes fish, birds and humans.
nouncountablespecialist
In linguistics, a very large group of languages that may share a distant common ancestor.
Grammar: Used with names of language families: the phylum contains many separate families.
Some scholars place these languages in a single phylum, though others doubt the link.
The paper compares grammar across an entire phylum of languages.
Word forms
| plural | phyla |
|---|
Common combinations
- belong to a phylum
- Starfish belong to a phylum of their own.
- animal phylum
- Arthropods are the largest animal phylum by number of species.
- phylum Chordata
- Every animal with a backbone is placed in the phylum Chordata.
- classify by phylum
- The museum arranged the specimens by phylum.
- kingdom, phylum, class
- Remember the order kingdom, phylum, class when you revise taxonomy.
Synonyms and how they differ
- division
- Division is the term botanists often use for the same rank in plants and fungi, whereas phylum is the usual word for animals.
- taxon
- A taxon is any named group at any rank, so it is broader and less specific than phylum.
Word family
- phyla noun
- the plural of phylum
- phylogeny noun
- the evolutionary history of a group of organisms
- phylogenetic adjective
- relating to evolutionary relationships
- subphylum noun
- a rank just below phylum
Commonly confused: phylum or phylogeny?
phylum vs phylogeny
Phylogeny is the study or record of evolutionary relationships, not a rank; a phylum is one level in the classification itself.
Practice
In biological classification, a phylum is ranked directly below the ___.
Choose one answer.
The kingdom is the largest group, and each kingdom is divided into phyla. Class is the next level down, so it comes after phylum, not before.
Make it your own
Write a sentence using “phylum”, then check it and compare it with the examples above.