Zoology

How to spell zoology

7 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce zoology

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does zoology mean?

1. nounThe scientific study of animals, including their structure, behaviour, and classification.

Zoology in a sentence

• She studied zoology before specialising in marine biology.

• The university offers a degree in zoology alongside botany.

Where does zoology come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word is built from two Greek pieces: zoion, meaning 'living being' or 'animal', and logia, meaning 'study' or 'an account of something'. The Greek zoion itself traces back to zoe, meaning 'life', the same root that gives us 'zodiac' (originally a circle of animal figures in the sky). Scholars assembled the modern compound in the seventeenth century as scientific Latin, zoologia, and English adopted it around the 1660s to name the branch of natural science dealing with animals. The familiar word 'zoo' is simply a clipped, everyday shortening of 'zoological garden'. The spelling trap lives at the front: the double 'o' represents the Greek 'zo-' followed by the 'o' that opens '-ology', so two o's sit side by side even though many speakers say it as a single run-on vowel.

How the word is built

• zoo- (from Greek zoion: living being, animal)
• -logy (from logia: study, discourse)