It's the Word of the Day podcast for September 11th.
Today's word is zoomorphic, spelled Z-O-O-M-O-R-P-H-I-C.
Zoomorphic is an adjective.
It describes things that have the form of an animal.
Here's the word used in a sentence from Smithsonian Magazine.
The oldest known ceramics come from a handful of sites in the Czech Republic and date back to about 28,000 BCE,
roughly 10,000 years after the Neanderthals went extinct.
A now iconic figure of a woman and assorted ceramics were found at a Czech site in 1925.
Additional anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines were found over the ensuing decades,
and in 2002 fingerprints were discovered on many of the objects.
The first known use of the word zoomorphic in English is a translation of the French word zoomorphique used in a mid-19th century book on paleography to describe an ornately designed Greek letter in a manuscript from the Middle Ages.
In these words,
the text commences with a zoomorphic letter formed of two-winged dragons united by the tails,
the open space being ornamented with elegant arabesques composed of leaves and flowers.
The zoo, or Z-O-O in zoomorphic,
comes from the Greek noun zoion, meaning animal, and morphic from morphe, meaning form.
The translation of zoomorphic to zoomorphic made perfect sense given the existence of a similarly constructed word anthropomorphic,
meaning having human form, which made its debut half a century earlier.
With your Word of the Day, I'm Peter Sokolowski.