Jimmy and his high-school classmates wonder about the pronunciation of words like zooplankton, zoology, and zoological. The traditional pronunciation for many scientific terms that start with zoo- is to use a long o rather than an oo sound. The reason stems from the fact that the original Greek roots for these words use two different Greek letters — omega, which is a long o, and omicron, which is a short one. These days, though, the word zoo, short for zoological garden, influences the way lay people pronounce those words. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Pronouncing Zoology”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Jimmy. I’m calling from Prescott, Arizona.
Prescott, Arizona. Welcome to the show.
Jimmy, what can we do for you?
So, we were in our biology class and we were actually talking about coral.
And coral have a mutualistic relationship with these algae called zooxanthellae.
And they’re spelled right Z-O-O-X-A-N-T-H-E-L-L-A-A-E.
And the question came up, why is it not pronounced zooxanthelai?
And we compared this to, like, for instance, zooplankton.
Most people would say zooplankton, but according to this spelling, it would be zooplankton.
Mm—
Yeah, so why would the Z-O-O beginning of those words be pronounced zoo-o?
So like another example would be we would typically say zoology, right?
But our teacher says that it should be pronounced zoology.
And we, again, compare this like this just broke out into a big old conversation between our whole class.
Right. Yay.
And we compared it to the word zoom.
Right. You don’t say zoem.
Right.
You say zoom.
Right. So what’s going on here? Well, the super traditional scientific pronunciation would be a long O sound like zooplankton or zoology.
And the reason is that they go back to a Greek stem that means animal that gives us that ZOO.
And the Greek letters there are zeta, which is a Z sound, and then omega, which is a long O.
It’s like the big O, the mega O, omega, followed by a short O.
That’s omicron.
There are two different kinds of O’s in ancient Greek, omega and omicron.
And omicron is the little one and the short one.
And so for that reason, in the 19th century, learned scientists who had more of a familiarity with classical languages would have pronounced those as zoology and zooplankton and that kind of thing.
But what has happened in recent years, of course, is you mentioned zoo.
And in London, they formed the Zoological Society of London that eventually had a zoological garden.
But you see those two letters together in English, and you do think zoo.
And so today, people will use those words interchangeably, like zoological or zoological.
And you know what’s really weird, too, is that just as there’s diversity in the natural world, there’s diversity in language.
And if you look up a word like, for example, zooplankton in the Oxford English Dictionary, it has six different pronunciations of it.
Oh, my gosh.
Yeah, you stress the word differently depending on what you were taught.
And you have the long O as well as the short O.
So my question would then become, when you go to the zoo, is it zoa?
Does that change at all?
No, it’s a zoo, but that’s just because the more that people have seen the word zoological,
They’ve started to pronounce it that way.
So once zoological was shortened to Z-O-O, it’s always been Z.
Nobody ever said ZOA, just plain old ZOA, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was just an abbreviation of a longer word.
So, Jimmy, you said you were in class.
What grade are we talking?
I’m currently a senior, and the class is animal diversity.
Okay.
Great.
Sounds like a cool class, senior in high school.
Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.
Thanks for taking time out of your class today.
We appreciate it.
Hey, no problem.
All right, take care.
Thank you for analyzing our words.
Well, we enjoyed it.
Call us again sometime.
Thanks, Jimmy.
Yep.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
All that history in a single word, right?
I know.
So to summarize.
Yeah.
There’s no summary.
Well, yeah.
I mean, you can do the strict traditional pronunciation.
Well, part of it is the foreignness of how the words were made.
They’re not originally English in their parts, right?
That’s part of the weirdness of it.
Part of it is scientific terminology, once borrowed into everyday English, tends to undergo some transformation, right?
Part of it is a lot of us learn those words reading them and not by hearing them spoken by experts.
So there’s all these different paths where they could be transformed.
Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.
