Word.ws English Dictionary

zoonym

/ˈzəʊ.ə.nɪm/US/ˈzoʊ.ə.nɪm/

zoonym noun: the common name for a (species of) animal.

Noun

zoonym (plural zoonyms)

  1. The common name for a (species of) animal
    • ln favour of their special relations with the front-Asian civilization there speaks not only the term knjiga but the zoonym opica as well.1997, Serbian Literary Magazine, page 19
    • 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...2014, Cristiana Franco, Shameless: The Canine and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, page 11

Forms of zoonym

pluralzoonyms

Origin of zoonym

From zoo- + -onym.

Questions about zoonym

What does zoonym mean?
Zoonym means the common name for a (species of) animal.
What part of speech is zoonym?
Zoonym is a noun.
How do you pronounce zoonym?
Zoonym is pronounced /ˈzoʊ.ə.nɪm/ (US).
What is the plural of zoonym?
The plural of zoonym is zoonyms.

Words near zoonym in the dictionary

  1. zoonotically
  2. zoonotics
  3. zoons
  4. zoonule
  5. zoonules
  6. zoonym
  7. zoonyms
  8. zoop
  9. zoopagaceous
  10. zoopalaeontology
  11. zoopaleontology

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: zoonym (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-zoonym.wav.

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