POGONOTROPHY/ˌpəʊɡəˈnɒtrəfi/

Cultivation of a beard; beard-growing.

Do not — as a British journalist did some years ago — confuse this useful word with pogonotomy. Both originate in the Greek word pogon, a beard, but the latter ends in –tomia, cutting, and so is the word for trimming one’s beard, or shaving, the exact opposite of the writer’s intention. Pogonotrophy, on the other hand, ends with Greek trophe, nourishment, so its literal sense is “beard feeding”. Neither word is what you might call common; they usually appear only when somebody is writing in a mock-pompous, tongue-in-cheek way. Other words in pogon include pogonic, pertaining to a beard, and Pogonophora, the systematic name for a group of deep-sea worms; their name actually means “beard bearer”, which is odd, since they don’t have mouths to cultivate them around.

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