Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Cetacean
/sɪˈteɪʃən/noun
A member of the group of marine mammals comprising whales, dolphins and porpoises.
The Greek roots
κῆτος
kêtos
sea monster, huge fish
Literally: “sea-monster kind”
Follow a root:κῆτος3 words
The story of the word
κῆτος was a Greek catch-all for anything enormous in the sea, monster as readily as whale, and it is the beast Perseus kills to save Andromeda, still hanging in the sky as the constellation Cetus. Latin took it as cetus, and eighteenth-century naturalists built Cetacea on it. The classification was one of the places where anatomy beat appearance: warm blood, lungs and milk put these animals with cows rather than with cod.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Modern Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1830s
Same family
Cetuscetology
In a sentence
Every cetacean in the survey area was photographed and catalogued by its fin.
Cetacean hearing evolved for water and suffers badly from shipping noise.