mammal
pronunciation
How to pronounce mammal in British English:
UK [ˈmæml]
How to pronounce mammal in American English:
US [ˈmæml]
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- Noun:
- any warm-blooded vertebrate having the skin more or less covered with hair; young are born alive except for the small subclass of monotremes and nourished with milk
Word Origin
- mammal
- mammal: [19] Etymologically, mammal denotes an ‘animal that suckles its young’. The word is a derivative of mammalia [18], the term for that whole class of animals, coined by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus from Latin mammālis ‘of the breast’. This in turn was based on mamma ‘mother, breast’, which has been traced back to a prehistoric Indo-European *mammā.There are obvious links with ‘mother’-terms in other languages, such as Greek mámmē, French maman, Italian mamma, Russian mama, Welsh mam, and English mamma and mummy, but whether a sustained chain of descent and borrowing is involved, or simply parallel formation based on the syllable ma, imitative of the sound of a suckling baby, is not clear. Mammary [17] is an English derivative of Latin mamma, in the sense ‘breast’.=> mamma, mammary, mummy
- mammal (n.)
- 1826, anglicized form of Modern Latin Mammalia (1773), coined 1758 by Linnaeus for the class of mammals, from neuter plural of Late Latin mammalis "of the breast," from Latin mamma "breast," perhaps cognate with mamma.
Example
- 1. That 's the reality of being a mammal .
- 2. Then a similar mammal was found in myanmar in 1990 .
- 3. Researchers have produced a variant of h5n1 that reportedly can spread from one mammal to another .
- 4. But given a grain of cortex , it is not easy to tell from which mammal it came .
- 5. The problem with that theory is that no other mammal has resorted to this method of cooling down .