zoo
Pluralzoos
- 1A park where live animals are kept and exhibited to the public.
The city zoo opened a new rainforest exhibit with sloths and jaguars.
Many zoos now breed endangered species and return some of them to the wild.
Similarmenagerie
Note
The word began as a clipping of zoological garden or zoological park, and the short form is now the usual one; zoology shares its first element. Capitalize it as part of a name, the London Zoo, but not in the city zoo. A crowd of different creatures kept side by side is the picture behind the “chaotic place” meaning and the “mixed collection” meaning.
- 2
- 3A large, mixed collection of things of many different kinds.
Physicists in the 1950s faced a growing zoo of new particles that no theory could explain.
The software has a bewildering zoo of settings, and hardly anyone touches most of them.
Similarmenagerie, assortment, hodgepodge, jumble
Note
Physics writing is at home with this sense: Michio Kaku's The God Equation (2021) speaks of the zoo of subatomic particles, and Antonino Zichichi in 2001 of an entire zoo of possibilities; strange stars, hybrid stars. It runs in the pattern a zoo of something, often sharpened by entire or veritable, and it suggests a collection that is untidy, not merely large.
- 4The jungle, especially as the setting of military patrols and combat.
After a week in the zoo, the patrol came back soaked, exhausted, and covered in leech bites.
The new lieutenant had never been out in the zoo, and it showed on his first patrol.
Note
American soldiers used it for the jungle they patrolled, and it carries their dread with it: E. E. “Doc” Murdock, in “My Vietnam War” (2013), describes a lurking anxiety at being out in the dreaded jungle, the zoo. It takes the and names a place you go out into or come back from: out in the zoo, back from the zoo.
Practice
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Origin
A clipping of zoological garden or zoological park, and now the usual form; see zoology. The sense relating to zoophilia is a separate clipping, of zoophile or zoophilia.