zoonym

English

Etymology

From zoo- +‎ -onym.

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈzoʊ.ə.nɪm/
• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈzəʊ.ə.nɪm/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

Noun

zoonym (plural zoonyms)

1. (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 […]

Usage notes

• In older literature, zoonyms are occasionally found in use for the classificatory (“scientific”) names, which is not recommended by International Council of Onomastic Sciences.

Translations

common name for an animal

• Czech: zoonymum n
• Estonian: zoonüüm, loomanimi
• Finnish: eläimennimi
• French: zoonyme (fr) m
• Hungarian: állatnév (hu)
• Interlingua: zoonymo
• Italian: zoonimo m
• Macedonian: зооним m (zoonim)
• Polish: zoonim (pl) m
• Portuguese: zoônimo m
• Romanian: zoonim n
• Russian: зооним (ru) m (zoonim)
• Serbo-Croatian: zoonim m
• Slovak: zoonymum n
• Spanish: zoonimo (es) m
• Ukrainian: зоонім (zoonim)