- Paul Anthony Jones
Zeitgeber
(n.) any naturally or seasonally recurring event that provides a timeframe for living creatures
Who doesnât love a bit of obscure ecological vocabulary to start the day? With that in mind, the word zeitgeber popped up on HH yesterday evening:
...and so hereâs a little bit more about it.
No prizes for guessing that zeitgeber is a word we owe to German. (Strictly speaking, in fact, as a German noun it should be spelled with an uppercase Z, but weâll let that slide here.)
As we explained over on Twitter, zeitgeber literally means âtime-giverâ in German, but its more usual (i.e. non-literal) English translation is typically said to be something along the lines of a âsynchronizer,â or something similar. Etymologically, however, that initial âzeitâ might well be familiar: itâs the same root as seen in zeitgeist, the literal âspiritâ of an age or era.
The term zeitgeber itself was coined in 1958 by JĂźrgen Aschoff, a German biologist and ecologist known as one of the founding fathers of chronobiology, the field of science concerned with the regular, cyclic behaviour of and phenomena found in all living organismsâknown as âbiological rhythmsââand how these are influenced by or corollate with lunar and solar time.
Aschoffâs work proved that organisms have an internalized or so-called âendogenousâ body clockâbut he also postulated that there must be exterior, or âexogenousâ phenomena that can also have an effect on all living things. And itâs those exogenous eventsâlike the sun rising and setting, the phases of the moon, or the changing of the seasonsâthat he called zeitgeber.