I was watching one of those ‘ahh-inducing’ animal rescue programmes the other day, and noticed a rather fun, and cute, word for the young of a particular species (I can’t tell you what it was, as it’s in the quiz below).
Anyway, it set me thinking. We’re all familiar with terms like cub, pup, kit and calf, but do you know how many different species they can relate to? It’s actually a lot more than I would have thought; some of them pretty much to be expected, others a bit of a surprise.
So just for fun, see if you can put these into the right groups of pup, kit, calf and cub:
guinea pig dolphin giraffe raccoon walrus
bat chinchilla hippopotamus skunk
giraffe badger rabbit seal bat
How did you get on? The answers are shown below.
What about other words for animals’ young, though, including the one that caught my interest the other day? Well, see if you can work out what these babies would be called:
crocodile hedgehog gorilla alpaca
peacock possum owl pigeon
cockroach eel hare squirrel
(I should point out that there is some disagreement on the ‘right’ term to use for some of these – particularly some of the pup / kit / cub ones – depending on what reference source you use. I’ve gone for the most common usage, but if you got something different, you’re probably right somewhere!)
It’s fascinating, though, that animals which seem so different – a cat and a squirrel, or a dolphin and a giraffe, for example – can have the same word for the name of their young. And whilst a baby dolphin is a calf, a baby shark is a pup (Yes, I know, mammal versus fish, but even so). There are some really quite appropriate-seeming names too though – a baby snake can be called (among other things) a snakelet, a baby spider is a spiderling, and a baby platypus is a puggle (sounds like something JK Rowling might have come up with!).
Of course, we call our own young anything from baby to bairn to tot, toddler or urchin, so I suppose it’s not that surprising that there are so many words out there for offspring.
Answers
pup kit calf cub
guinea pig chinchilla dolphin badger
bat rabbit giraffe raccoon
seal skunk hippopotamus walrus
crocodile – hatchling hedgehog – hoglet gorilla – infant
alpaca – cria peacock – peachick possum – joey
owl – owlet pigeon – squab cockroach – nymph
eel – elver hare – leveret squirrel – kitten
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I thought I knew a lot about animals, but some of these had me stumped!
loved it!
Well, I’m speechless now!! By the way what about spiders?
Wow this was indeed fun and educational. Are baby spiders called spinsters? Actually I went to the web and found ‘spiderling’, dahling. 🙂
@Rich – I hope that’s speechless in a good way! Spiders are spiderlings (see penultimate paragraph). I think that’s possibly one of my favourites – it seems so appropriate somehow!
Wow! that was interesting to read.i am going to share t with my students too1
Just the sort of thing, that tickles my fancy…………
IN answer to Posted by Robert N. Hedberg on 13th May, 2010
Are baby spiders called spinsters?
Perhaps : LADY SPIDERS are called (should be called) SPINSTERS
also : I know a JOEY as the young of a kangaroo (and also possum apparently)
Very entertaining! Will do with a class of biologists with a preferance for classification and nomenclature.
It’s great to see so much interest in this post – I feel a sequel coming on at some point!
I find the expression “ahh-inducing” very interesting. “Ahh“ is meant in the sense of “how cute!”, isn’t it? Or is it more like “ahh, how interesting, I didn’t know this”?
Thanks for your comment Katrin. I meant it in the sense of ‘ahh, how cute!’, as you suspected, though I can see where the confusion might lie.
I think if I’d meant the ‘how interesting!’ meaning, I would probably have used ‘aha’ instead of ‘ahh’, or even just ‘ah’. The extra ‘h’ in ‘ahh’ indicates the longer, falling sound of the ‘how cute!’ meaning, while the single ‘h’ in ‘ah’ is less emotional, more rational/intellectual (to my mind, anyway).
‘Aha’ tends to be for those instances of realisation, so I might have used it to suggest I’d only just realised how interesting something was.’Aha-inducing’ doesn’t sound quite right though, so I would probably have used the colloquial phrase ‘aha moment’ , and so the sentence would have been more like: “I had one of those ‘aha moments’ watching an animal rescue programme the other day…”