Genus (plural genera) and species had been employed by naturalists for over a hundred years before Linnaeus, and order, class and family in their biological senses all came into use in the 1750s and 60s. But phylum wasn’t coined until 1876 (by the German Ernst Haeckel), and family and order were treated as interchangeable until early in the twentieth century. For a time zoologists used family where botanists placed order, to the occasional confusion of nearly everyone.1
