zoonym

plural zoonyms

1. The proper name of an animal (e.g. the dog name Fido).

   1 more example

   The type of zoonym varies with the animal and its milieu. Pets often have simple hypocoristic names. “Professional” animals, such as show dogs and cats, have public pedigree names in addition to their private domestic names. Racehorses are frequently named for their sire (male parent) and dam (female parent) in order to show their line of breeding.

   1996, Adrian Room, An Alphabetical GUide to the Language of Name Studies, page 107

2. The common name for a species of animal.

   ln favour of their special relations with the front-Asian civilization there speaks not only the term knjiga but the zoonym opica as well.

   1997, Serbian Literary Magazine, page 19

   2 more examples

   In a study of considerable interest, he claimed to find a correlation between the offensive use of an anima's name and its position in the cultural taxonomy: it is not so much the animal's negative characteristics as its position with respect to humans that determines the choice of zoonym for an insult.

   2014, Cristiana Franco, Shameless: The Canine and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, page 11

   By contrast, the zoonym mockingbird denotes the bird species Mimus polyglottus, a bird which imitates the cries or the notes of other birds, and lives in southern North America, Central America […]

   2014, Nachum Dershowitz, Language, Culture, Computation: Computing for the Humanities, Law, and Narratives, page 202

   Synonyms: animal species name