Word of the Day:
bestiary
What It Means
A medieval treatise of various real or imaginary animals.
A collection of various beasts, depicted in art, literature, or the like.
A list or guidebook of the monsters to be found in a roleplaying game.
Bestiary in Context
“Later artworks showed many animals and gods, some of which were clearly identified with heavenly bodies. [...] Each shows a splendidly vivacious bestiary and pantheon, including the Sun-Moon-Venus symbols and a lion-versus-bull combat scene with an eagle or man-bull joining in.”
Did You Know?
Borrowed from Medieval Latin bēstiārium, from Latin bēstia (“beast, animal”). By surface analysis, beast + -ary.
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: bestiary (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “bestiary.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bestiary. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.