It's the Word of the Day podcast for September 11th.

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That's audible.com.com. UK slash Wondery. Today's audible.com.uk.uk-wondery. Today's word is zoomorphic, spelled Z-O-O-M-O-R-P-H-I-C. Zawomorphic 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 zoomorphic 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 morphique

from Morphae, meaning form. The translation of zoemorphic 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.

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