Fauna

How to spell fauna

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce fauna

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does fauna mean?

1. nounThe animals of a particular region, habitat, or geological period, considered collectively.

Fauna in a sentence

• The survey recorded every species of native fauna in the wetland.

• The island's isolated fauna includes birds found nowhere else on earth.

Where does fauna come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Fauna began life not as a description but as a name: in Roman religion Fauna was a goddess of the fields, woods, and animals, the female counterpart of the god Faunus, both of them protectors of flocks, herds, and wild creatures. The word reached scientific English thanks to the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who in 1746 published a survey of the animals of Sweden under the title Fauna Suecica, deliberately pairing it with his earlier botanical work Flora. From that point fauna came to mean the entire animal life of a particular region or period, and it has kept that collective sense ever since. The spelling preserves the Latin -auna intact, and the silent pairing with its twin term flora is worth remembering, since the two are almost always used together. The trap for writers is the 'au' vowel, which sounds like a plain 'aw' yet must be spelled with both letters.

How the word is built

• fauna (from Fauna, a Roman goddess of the countryside and living creatures); a borrowed proper name used whole, with no separable prefix or suffix