Other forms: ecosystems
An ecosystem is a community of living things and their surroundings working as one system. A fragile ecosystem, the whole ecosystem, ecosystem collapse.
The point of the word is interdependence: removing one species changes everything else, sometimes catastrophically and rarely predictably. Ecosystem services is the term for what natural systems do for free — pollination, water filtering, flood control — and putting a price on them is a contested but influential idea. In business, ecosystem now means a set of connected products and companies, which is a metaphor with real force.
1nounecosystemA community of living things and their surroundings as one system.
“Pollution from the factory damaged the whole river ecosystem, from insects to otters.”
2nounsetA set of connected products and companies.
“Once you own the phone, the company's ecosystem of apps and gadgets makes it hard to switch.”
ecosystem is an interdependent system.
Proto-Indo-European
*sem-
Middle French
systeme
English
system
English, today
ecosystem
Built from
From eco + system. coined by Arthur Tansley in 1935 in a paper titled The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts in the journal Ecology. system Borrowed from Middle French systeme. Partly Middle French sisteme, systeme, partly directly from its etymon Latin systēma (“harmony; musical scale; set of celestial objects; set of troops; system”), from Ancient Greek σύστημα (“musical scale; organized body; whole made of several parts or members”), from σῠνίστημῐ (“to combine, organize”) + -μᾰ. σῠνίστημῐ is from σῠν- (“with, together”) + ἵστημι (“to stand”), from Proto-Indo-European steh₂- (“to stand (up)”). Cognate with Dutch systeem, modern French système, German System, Italian sistema, Portuguese sistema, Spanish sistema. a doublet of systema.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA