Mimicry
/ˈmɪmɪkri/noun
Close imitation of someone or something, and in biology the resemblance of one species to another that gives it protection.
The Greek roots
Literally: “acting the part of another”
The story of the word
A μῖμος was a performer in a low, broad kind of Greek comedy, and the word came through Latin mimicus into English mimic in the 1500s. Biology took it over in 1862, when Henry Walter Bates explained why harmless Amazonian butterflies wear the warning colours of poisonous ones. Bates spent eleven years on the river and shipped home some fourteen thousand species, more than half of them new to science, which is how he had the sample to notice.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
The hoverfly's mimicry is good enough to fool a bird and not quite good enough to fool a beekeeper.
His mimicry of the head teacher was cruel and entirely accurate.