An archaic term for a coloring substance in plants, such as chlorophyll; a plant pigment.
From Greek 'chroma' (color) + 'phyl' (leaf/plant). This older variant was superseded by more specific terms like chlorophyll, xanthophyll, and carotenoid in modern botany.
Before botanists distinguished between chlorophyll (green), xanthophyll (yellow), and carotenoid (orange), they lumped all plant pigments together as 'chromophyls'—a reminder that scientific naming keeps getting more precise.
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