Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Platypus
/ˈplætɪpəs/noun
An egg-laying Australian mammal with a duck-like bill and webbed feet.
The Greek roots
πλατύς
platýs
flat, broad
πούς
poús
foot
Literally: “flat foot”
The story of the word
George Shaw named it Platypus anatinus in 1799, while half suspecting the specimen was a hoax sewn together from other animals. The genus name had to be surrendered because a bark beetle already held it, so zoologists moved to Ornithorhynchus. The discarded name survived as the ordinary English word, and if you insist on the Greek, the plural is platypodes rather than platypi.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1799
Same family
plateauoctopuspodiumplatitude
In a sentence
A platypus hunts with its eyes shut, reading electric fields with its bill.