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In the English language, many animals have different names depending on whether they are male, female, young, domesticated, or in groups. The best-known source of many English words used for collective groupings of animals is The Book of Saint Albans , an essay on hunting published in 1486 and attributed to Juliana Berners . [ 1 ]
Eric Partridge refers to these sporting terms as "snob plurals" and conjectures that they may have developed by analogy with the common English irregular plural animal words "deer", "sheep" and "trout". [6] Similarly, nearly all kinds of fish have no separate plural form (though there are exceptions—such as rays, sharks or lampreys).
The word cow came via Anglo-Saxon cū (plural cȳ), from Common Indo-European gʷōus (genitive gʷowés) 'a bovine animal', cf. Persian: gâv, Sanskrit: go-, Welsh: buwch. [18] The plural cȳ became ki or kie in Middle English, and an additional plural ending was often added, giving kine, kien, but also kies, kuin and others.
The form of the English name (since 1698) was altered to its "-goose" ending by folk etymology. [12] It was spelled "mungoose" in the 18th and 19th centuries. The plural form is "mongooses".
A binomial name is also called a binomen (plural binomina) or binominal name. [2] Both codes consider the first part of the two-part name for a species to be the "generic name". In the zoological code (ICZN), the second part of the name is a "specific name". In the botanical code (ICNafp), it is a "specific epithet". Together, these two parts ...
The binomial name often reflects limited knowledge or hearsay about a species at the time it was named. For instance Pan troglodytes, the chimpanzee, and Troglodytes troglodytes, the wren, are not necessarily cave-dwellers. Sometimes a genus name or specific descriptor is simply the Latin or Greek name for the animal (e.g. Canis is Latin for ...
nomen confusum (plural: nomina confusa), (bact.) a name based on a mixed bacterial culture; nomen perplexum (plural: nomina perplexa), a name confusingly similar to another name or names; nomen periculosum (plural: nomina periculosa), an name which can lead to dangerous outcomes, through confusion
With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, are able to move, reproduce sexually, and grow from a hollow sphere of cells, the blastula, during embryonic development. Over 1.5 million living animal species have been described —of which around 1 million are insects —but it has been estimated there are over 7 million ...