taxon

See also: Taxon, taxón, táxon, and tàxon

English

Etymology

Back-formation from taxonomy. By surface analysis, taxo- +‎ -on.

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ˈtæksɒn/, /ˈtæksən/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈtæksɑn/

• Audio (UK):

  (file)

• Audio (US):

  (file)

Noun

taxon (plural taxa or (proscribed) taxons)

1. (taxonomy) A group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms treated as a unit by taxonomists.

   Hyponyms: see Thesaurus:taxon

   • 2018, Patrick K Piekarski et al., “Phylogenomic Evidence Overturns Current Conceptions of Social Evolution in Wasps (Vespidae)”, in Molecular Biology and Evolution‎^[1], archived from the original on 27 February 2025:

     However, we also performed analyses after excluding solitary taxa to check the robustness of the reconstructions to variation in taxon sampling.

Derived terms

• adelphotaxon
• daughter taxon
• Elvis taxon
• eutaxon
• form taxon
• ichnotaxon
• intertaxon
• intrataxon
• Lazarus taxon
• morphotaxon
• multitaxon
• nothotaxon
• ootaxon
• orthotaxon
• palynotaxon
• parataxon
• parent taxon
• subtaxon
• supertaxon
• taxonic
• taxonically
• taxonicity
• taxonify
• wastebasket taxon
• zombie taxon

Translations

taxonomic group

• Arabic: وَحْدَةٌ تَصْنِيفِيَّةٌ f (waḥdatun taṣnīfiyyatun)
• Armenian: please add this translation if you can
• Bulgarian: таксон m (takson)
• Catalan: tàxon m, taxó m
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 分類單元 / 分类单元 (fēnlèi dānyuán)

• Czech: taxon (cs) m
• Dutch: taxon (nl) n
• Esperanto: taksono (eo)
• Finnish: taksoni (fi)
• French: taxon (fr) m
• Galician: taxon (gl) m
• Georgian: please add this translation if you can
• German: Taxon (de) n
• Hindi: please add this translation if you can
• Japanese: 分類群 (ja) (ぶんるいぐん, bunruigun), タクソン (ja) (takuson)
• Korean: 분류군(分類群) (bullyugun)
• Macedonian: таксон m (takson)
• Polish: takson (pl) m
• Portuguese: táxon (pt) m
• Romanian: taxon m
• Russian: таксон (ru) m (takson)
• Scottish Gaelic: tacson m
• Serbo-Croatian:

  Cyrillic: таксон m

  Latin: takson (sh) m

• Slovene: taksọ̑n m
• Spanish: taxón (es) m, taxon (es) m
• Swedish: taxon (sv) n
• Tamil: please add this translation if you can
• Vietnamese: đơn vị phân loại

Further reading

• taxon on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Anagrams

• Axton

Dutch

Etymology

An internationalism, representing a back-formation from taxonomie.

Pronunciation

• Audio:

  (file)

Noun

taxon n (plural taxa or taxons, no diminutive)

1. (taxonomy) taxon

French

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /tak.sɔ̃/

• Audio (France (Lyon)):

  (file)

Noun

taxon m (plural taxons)

1. (taxonomy) taxon

Romanian

Etymology

Borrowed from French taxon.

Noun

taxon m (plural taxoni)

1. (taxonomy) taxon

Declension

	singular		plural
	indefinite	definite	indefinite	definite
nominative-accusative	taxon	taxonul	taxoni	taxonii
genitive-dative	taxon	taxonului	taxoni	taxonilor
vocative	taxonule		taxonilor

Spanish

Noun

taxon m (plural táxones)

1. (uncommon) alternative form of taxón

Further reading

• “taxon”, in Diccionario de la lengua española [Dictionary of the Spanish Language] (in Spanish), online version 23.8.1, Royal Spanish Academy [Spanish: Real Academia Española], 15 December 2025