Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Chiroptera
/kaɪˈrɒptərə/noun
The mammal order that contains all bats.
The Greek roots
χείρ
cheír
hand
πτερόν
pterón
wing, feather
Literally: “hand-wing”
The story of the word
Blumenbach named the order in 1779, and the name is an anatomy lesson in one word: a bat's wing is a hand with the finger bones drawn out long and skin stretched between them. The thumb stays free and hooked, for climbing. Cheir also built cheirourgos, hand-worker, which came through Latin and French into English as surgeon.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 18th century
Same family
chiropracticsurgeryhelicopterpterodactyl
In a sentence
Chiroptera account for about a fifth of all living mammal species.