Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Echidna
/ɪˈkɪdnə/noun
A spiny egg-laying mammal of Australia and New Guinea.
The Greek roots
ἔχιδνα
ékhidna
she-viper
Literally: “female viper”
Follow a root:ἔχιδνα1 word
The story of the word
Ἔχιδνα in Hesiod is half beautiful woman and half snake, mother of Cerberus, the Chimera and the Sphinx. Cuvier applied the name to the Australian animal in 1797, a beast that suits a mother of hybrids: it has a beak, spines, a pouch, and milk that seeps through the skin because it has no nipples. Its fellow monotreme the platypus was named separately, from Greek for flat foot.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
In a sentence
An echidna crossed the track ahead of us and buried itself in a heartbeat.