dinosaur

Etymology

It is borrowed from New Latin Dinosauria, with the ending dropped,^[2][3] or dinosaurus;^[4][5][6] the scientific name was coined by the English anatomist Sir Richard Owen in 1841,^[7][8][9] from Ancient Greek δεινός (deinós, “terrible, fearsome”) and σαῦρος (saûros, “lizard”).^{[7][4][10][6]} Barnhart relates the first element to Greek words for fear and traces it to the root Proto-Indo-European *dwei-,^[4] and Ayto notes that the same base produced English dire.^[11] The word for a lizard is of unknown origin.^[4]

Earliest recorded meaning

A member of the group of extinct reptiles, many very large, that dominated life on land in the Mesozoic era: Etymonline, Barnhart and Merriam-Webster date the word to 1841,^[7][4][3] and the OED's first example is from Owen's report to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, published in 1842.^[2][12]

Semantic evolution

Ayto points out that the name, "terrible lizard", is something of a misnomer, as dinosaurs are not closely related to modern lizards.^[11] The figurative sense, a person or thing that is out of date or unable to adapt to change, is recorded by the OED from 1899, in the Washington Post;^[2] Etymonline dates it to 1952, and the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins says people have been called dinosaurs in this sense since the 1950s.^[7][9] Green's Dictionary of Slang records dinosaur for the penis in African American slang from 1980.^[13]

Timeline

• 1841 – coined by Richard Owen.^[7][4][3]
• 1842 – first example in print in the OED.^[2]
• 1899 – figurative, an outdated person or thing.^[2]
• 1952 – Etymonline's date for the figurative sense.^[7]

Modern meaning

Noun

1. Any of a large group of extinct reptiles, often of enormous size, that lived on land during the Mesozoic era.
2. A person, institution or thing regarded as old-fashioned and unable to adapt to change: The old mainframe had become a dinosaur.

Word family

• dinosauric
• dinosaurian
• -saur
• duck-billed dinosaur

Related words

• dire
• brontosaurus
• tyrannosaurus
• saurian

References

1. ^ a b Wiktionary, the free dictionary, https://en.wiktionary.org
2. ^ a b c d e Oxford English Dictionary Online (accessed March 2026), Oxford: Oxford University Press
3. ^ a b c Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary (2024), online ed., Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster
4. ^ a b c d e f Barnhart, Robert K. (1988), The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology
5. ^ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., ed. William R. Trumble and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press
6. ^ a b Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
7. ^ a b c d e f Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com
8. ^ Weekley, Ernest (1921), An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, London: John Murray
9. ^ a b Cresswell, Julia (2021), Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins, 3rd ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press
10. ^ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online 2024), 5th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
11. ^ a b Ayto, John (2005), Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z, 2nd ed., London: A & C Black
12. ^ Kay, Christian; Roberts, Jane; Samuels, Michael; Wotherspoon, Irené, eds. (2009), Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press; online edition (2024)
13. ^ Green, Jonathon (2010), Green's Dictionary of Slang, London: Chambers; digital ed. 2016–, https://greensdictofslang.com