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BIOME and BIOTA

For me, the word BIOME hardly ever came up until Minecraft started adding more and more biomes with its updates; there are even mods like Biomes O' Plenty that specialize in creative world generation.  A BIOME is essentially an ecosystem or local environment, not to be confused with the BIOTA which is the sum of all FLORA (plants) and FAUNA (animals) that live in the area.  You can also include the MICROFAUNA, which are all the microscopic denizens of a biome.  These are fairly recent words, with BIOME dated back to 1916 and BIOTA back to 1901.

A less common word for biome is BIOTOPE, which dates to 1927, peaked in the 1970s and is now very obscure.  And then a group of related biotopes is a BIOCHORE.

Oddly, the Google Ngram for "biome,biota,biotope" shows that BIOTA hit a peak in 1978.  

If you add biochore to the chart, it doesn't even register, but it's in the [MW] dictionary.

I wondered briefly what word took over that namespace, and figured it would be "ecosystem": check out the graph.

I would not expect to see a bump in usage of BIOME from Minecraft on the graph because Google is using the text of all of its books, not the overall chatter on the internet, but surely, tens of millions of players suddenly talking about finding different biomes must have had an impact.  Of course it's not the only game to have biomes, but it must be a contributor to how commonplace the word is now.

Here are some other words starting with BIO-, focusing on shorter words under 7 letters that are more likely to come up in word games. I am looking for words with the bio- root, dealing with life.  The bi- prefix, meaning "two" overlaps a bit, and will be weeded out.

BIO itself is a short form of biography; in college it's widely used short/slang for for biology but is oddly not in [MW] with that meaning.
BIOACTIVE means that a compound has an effect on living things.
BIOASSAY: finding the strength of a bioactive compound
BIOCHAR: a kind of charcoal made by burning organic material in a low-oxygen environment
BIOCHEM: short for biochemistry
BIOCHIP: a piece of electronics with biological elements.
BIOCIDE: killing living things, more commonly used when saying a compound is BIOCIDAL.
BIOFILM
BIOFILTER
BIOFUEL
BIOG: same as BIO
BIOGAS
BIOGEN
BIOGENIC
BIOGENY
BIOL: short for anything biology related
BIOLITE
BIOLITH: a mineral with a biological origin
BIOLOGIC
BIOLOGY
BIOLYTIC
BIOMASS
BIONIC: remember the Six Million Dollar Man?
BIONT: a unit of living matter, an organism
BIOPHAGY: eating living things
BIOPHILIA and BIOPHILIC: loving living things and natural settings,
BIOPIC of BIOFLICK: a biographical picture (movie)
BIOPIRATE and BIOPIRACY
BIOPSY: no, it is not pronounced "bibopsy" (my Big Fat Greek Wedding moment for the year).
BIOSCOPE
BIOSOLID
BIOSOME
BIOSPHERE
BIOTECH: biotechnology
BIOTEST
BIOTIC means something that involves living organisms, as in a biotic process vs an ABIOTIC process where no life was involved.  Most commonly known as the root of ANTIBIOTIC, compounds that kill germs.
BIOTIZE means adding life to a system
BIOTIN is a chemical,one of the B vitamins.
BIOTITE: a mineral, one of the forms of mica.  Oddly, there are verbs BIOTIZE and BIOTITIZE, to turn into biotite.
BIOTOPIC
BIOTYPE and BIOTYPIC
BIOWASTE
BIOZONE: the range of a species in the fossil record.

So, if you have BIO in your rack of letters, I hope this gives you some things to look for.



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