Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Batrachian
/bəˈtreɪkiən/noun
A frog or toad, or anything resembling one.
The Greek roots
βάτραχος
bátrakhos
frog
Literally: “of the frog”
Follow a root:βάτραχος1 word
The story of the word
Aristophanes staged Βάτραχοι in 405 BC, with a chorus of frogs croaking at Dionysus as he rows across to the underworld. Batrachian was once a formal zoological rank and is now mostly a literary word for a frog-faced look. The root stays in working scientific use through batrachotoxin, the poison the Colombian dart frogs carry in their skin.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
batrachotoxinbatrachology
In a sentence
A batrachian chorus started up in the ditch as soon as the rain stopped.
He had a wide batrachian smile that took up most of his face.