Word.ws English Dictionary

menagery

menagery is the archaic form of menagerie.

Meaning of menagerie

Noun

menagerie (plural menageries)

  1. A collection of live wild animals as an exhibition historically associated with the aristocracy and considered a precursor of modern zoos.
    Synonyms:
    zoo
  2. The enclosure where they are kept.
    • In Sacramento a crazed woman opened the cages of a circus menagerie for fear the animals might starve to death, and had been mauled by a lioness.1949, Bruce Kiskaddon, George R. Stewart, Earth Abides
  3. A diverse or miscellaneous group.
    • [Brigitte] Bardot, the stunning, desirable beauty who once stood for sexual freedom for women, spent the latter part of her life at her home near Saint Tropez with her husband and a menagerie of pets.2025 December 28, Elizabeth Blair, “Brigitte Bardot, sex goddess of cinema, has died”, in NPR
  4. (obsolete, slang) The orchestra of a theatre.

Forms of menagery

pluralmenageries

Questions about menagery

What is menagery the archaic form of?
Menagery is the archaic form of menagerie.

Words near menagery in the dictionary

  1. menage-a-trois
  2. menagerie
  3. menageries
  4. menagerist
  5. menagerists
  6. menagery
  7. menages
  8. menages a trois
  9. menages-a-trois
  10. menagogue
  11. menagogues

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: menagery (page history and authors); menagerie (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “menagery.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/menagery. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.