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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]
For example, the collective noun "group" can be applied to people ("a group of people"), or dogs ("a group of dogs"), or objects ("a group of stones"). Some collective nouns are specific to one kind of thing, especially terms of venery, which identify groups of specific animals. For example, "pride" as a term of venery always refers to lions ...
Used for large groups of animals that share similar characteristics; also used in names of bird and fish orders. Examples: Galliformes ("chicken form"); Anseriformes ("goose form"); Squaliformes ("shark form")
To learn more about this group, check out our roundup, below. We even included some fun facts about each one. Related: The Ultimate List: 101 Animals That Start With ‘A’
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 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 ...
The rules in the Code apply to the ranks of superfamily to subspecies, and only to some extent to those above the rank of superfamily. Among "genus-group names" and "species-group names" no further ranks are officially allowed, which creates problems when naming taxa in these groups in speciose clades, such as Rana. [15]
The term taxon was first used in 1926 by Adolf Meyer-Abich for animal groups, as a back-formation from the word taxonomy; the word taxonomy had been coined a century before from the Greek components τάξις (táxis), meaning "arrangement", and νόμος (nómos), meaning "method".