wildlife
- 1Animals living free in natural surroundings rather than tamed or kept by people, especially mammals, birds, and fish.
Photographers waited hours at the watering hole to capture the local wildlife.
Expanding cities push native wildlife into ever-smaller patches of forest.
Similarfauna
Note
A transparent compound of wild and life, and in everyday use it means animals first. It is uncountable, so it takes a singular verb and never a plural: the wildlife here is shy, not the wildlifes. It also often stands before another noun as a modifier, as in wildlife tours, naming what the activity or place is about.
The park runs wildlife tours at dawn and dusk.
The wildlife on the island is protected by law.
- 2Living organisms of every kind that exist in the wild without being domesticated, from animals to plants and fungi.
Ecologists study the region's wildlife as a whole: its plants, fungi, animals, and microbes.
Invasive species can disrupt native wildlife of every kind, not just the larger animals.
Note
The wider reading, and the one easiest to miss. Because the animal meaning is what most readers reach for, a sentence like "the island's wildlife is under threat" will usually be heard as birds and mammals. If trees, fungi or microbes belong to the point, name them, or the broader sense will quietly shrink back to the narrower one.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from "wild" combined with "life."