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zoonym. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
zoonym, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
zoonym in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word
zoonym you have here. The definition of the word
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English
Etymology
From zoo- + -onym.
Noun
zoonym (plural zoonyms)
- (linguistics) The common name for a (species of) animal
1997, Serbian Literary Magazine, page 19:ln favour of their special relations with the front-Asian civilization there speaks not only the term knjiga but the zoonym opica as well.
2014, Cristiana Franco, Shameless: The Canine and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, page 11:In a study of considerable interest, he claimed to find a correlation between the offensive use of an anima's name and its position in the cultural taxonomy: it is not so much the animal's negative characteristics as its position with respect to humans that determines the choice of zoonym for an insult.
2014, Nachum Dershowitz, Language, Culture, Computation: Computing for the Humanities, Law, and Narratives, page 202:By contrast, the zoonym mockingbird denotes the bird species Mimus polyglottus, a bird which imitates the cries or the notes of other birds, and lives in southern North America, Central America […]
Translations
common name for an animal