matro-

1. variant of matri-.

Example Sentences

Under whizzing bullets and a hail of Russian rockets, he said, he moved over half of Matro Luxe’s equipment from factories in Kyiv and Dnipro, in the east, and plans on expanding the business.

From New York Times

For executives like Pavlo Chernyak, the head of Matro Luxe, one of Ukraine’s biggest mattress makers, relocating to Ukraine’s western frontier opens what he sees as a great opportunity to offer employment to some of the tens of thousands of people who lost jobs because of the war.

From New York Times

To the Greeks, or at least those aristocratic enough to qualify as Matro’s audience, this was parody.

From New York Times

Matro aimed for comedy in the excesses of his dinner-party verse, but the tone of Archestratos’ work isn’t so clear, and he was disdained by later scholars for daring to imagine that, in compiling an index of culinary pleasures, he was “laying the foundation of some science likely to improve human existence.”

From New York Times

Words That Use matro-

What does matro- mean?

The combining form matro- is used like a prefix meaning “mother.” It is very rarely used in scientific terms, especially in genetics.

The form matro- comes from Latin māter, meaning “mother.” The word matrix, which has various meanings, including “womb,” comes from this same Latin root, as does matron, “a married woman.”

The Greek cognate of Latin māter is mḗtēr, also meaning “mother,” which is the source of words such as metropolis, a term that literally means “mother city.” Find out more at our entries for matrix, matron, and metropolis.

What are variants of matro-?

The form matro- is a variant of matri-, which swaps its –i– for an –o– when combined with words or word elements beginning with some consonants. When combined with words or word elements that begin with a vowel, matri- becomes matr-, as in matral. Want to know more? Read our Words That Use articles for each of these forms.

Examples of matro-

One example of a scientific term that features the form matro- is matrocliny, or matricliny, meaning “inheritance in which the traits of the offspring are derived primarily from the maternal parent.”

The form matro- means “mother,” while the -cliny part of the word roughly means “leaning,” from Greek klīnein. Matrocliny literally translates to “leaning (towards) the mother.”

What are some words that use the combining form matro-?

• matroclinous

What are some other forms that matro- may be commonly confused with?

• mast-
• masto-
• metr-
• metro-
• micro-