Taxon

Ultimately from the Greek τάξις 'arrangement, order' by irregular modern derivation through the French taxononie.

A taxon (pl. taxa) is a unit whose evolution with respect to other related units can be studied by using phylogenetic methods. Taxa correspond to particular states of the evolving organisms or their populations. They can be represented as genomic sequences or other characteristics. In stemmatology, textual states carried by manuscripts are often considered as taxa and they can be represented as sequences of words or characters encoding variants.

In other languages

Greek term used throughout.

TR