CLONE

Drawn originally from the field of horticulture, the word was first used to denote a branch that had been cut off and rerooted to form a new, self-sufficient plant. It comes from the Greek klÿn, or “twig,” and until the 20th century it was spelled without an e. In biology, the word came to mean any living thing created by asexual reproduction. Geneticist J. B. S. Haldane is credited with coining the modern usage—an exact genetic copy of an organism—in 1963, in a speech titled “Biological Possibilities for the Human Species of the Next Ten Thousand Years.” The word has also been co-opted to denote any copied object.