chimera means A supposed fire-breathing monster in Lycia with the head of a lion, body of a goat, and tail of a dragon or snake, killed by the hero Bellerophon. It carries an Arena rating of 1856, earned across 68 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, chimera ranks #17 of 17,104 for Most Storied Words, #145 of 17,135 for Most Malleable Words, #153 of 42,762 for Qualifying, #332 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books.
chimera is pronounced /kaɪˈmɪɹə/.
Why “chimera” is a great word
A thing composed of wildly disparate parts, especially a fanciful or impossible conception of the mind. From Latin *Chimaera*, from Ancient Greek Χίμαιρα (Khímaira, "she-goat"), the name of the mythological beast; first attested in English in the late 14th century. Unlike a "monolith," which stands solid and uniform, or a "ghost shark," a real, if peculiar, biological entity, a chimera is a creature of seams and sutures, an imaginative graft. It is the lion’s head snarling from the same flesh as the serpent’s tail, the blueprint for a perpetual motion machine, and the memory of a person you invented rather than knew—each one a testament to the mind’s irrepressible power to assemble coherence from fragments that cannot truly hold together.
Etymology
As the mythological beast, a variant case form of chimera, q.v. As an ancient mountain, directly from Latin mons Chimaera (“Mount Chimera”), from Ancient Greek Χίμαιρα (Khímaira), attested in Strabo.
name
- A supposed fire-breathing monster in Lycia with the head of a lion, body of a goat, and tail of a dragon or snake, killed by the hero Bellerophon.
- A fire-spewing mountain in Lycia or Cilicia, presumed to be an ancient name for the Yanartaş region of Turkey's Antalya Province.
- Former name of Himara, a port town in southern Albania.
- Former name of Ceraunian Mountains, the Albanian mountain range near Himara.
noun
- Any fantastic creature combining parts from different animals.
- A foolish, incongruous, or vain thought or product of the imagination.
- Anything composed of very disparate parts.e.g.“He built his car one piece at a time, producing a chimera with the head of a Volkswagen, the body of a Geely, and the tail of an aftermarket Porsche.”
- A grotesque like a gargoyle, but without a spout for rainwater.
- An organism with genetically distinct cells originating from two or more zygotes.e.g.“The DNA test returned a false negative because the killer was a chimera, having absorbed her twin in utero.”
- Synonym of bogeyman: any terrifying thing, especially as an unreal, imagined threat.e.g.“How could that Chymera haue come in any mannes mynd?” — 1587, Philippe de Mornay, translated by Philip Sidney et al., A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion, page 433:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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