animals

Long before an animal became something with paws, wings, or scales, the Latin word anima meant “breath”—the visible puff that proves a body is alive. Roman writers then used animale, literally “a breathing or living thing,” and medieval English borrowed it through Old French as animal. For centuries, English speakers already had deer, from Old English dēor, meaning simply “animal”; animal gradually pushed that older word toward its narrower modern meaning. By the 1580s, animal could even describe a brutish person whose instincts seemed stronger than reason. The word’s oldest clue is still hiding in animate and inanimate: to be an animal, etymologically, is to be on the breathing side of the line.