zoonym
English edit
Etymology edit
Noun edit
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[1], 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[2], 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 […]