Phylum (disambiguation)

In biology/paleontology a phylum (plural: phyla) is the second-highest division of lifeforms using the classical nomenclature derived from the work of the 18th century scientist Carolus Linnaeus. At the top of the heirarchy are a handful of biological kingdoms including plants, prokaryotic bacteria, eukaryotic bacteria, archean bacteria, and multicelled animals. The kingdom metazoa is subdivided into phyla. The corresponding entity for plants is called a division. A list on metazoan phyla is provided in the article on Metazoa.

In linguistics the term phylum was introduced in comparative work and means "super-family" of languages possibly being related.