menagerie means A collection of live wild animals as an exhibition historically associated with the aristocracy and considered a precursor of modern zoos.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, menagerie ranks #3,245 of 14,297 for Best Fossil-Poetry Words.
menagerie is pronounced /məˈnæd͡ʒəɹɪ/.
Why “menagerie” is a great word
A collection of live wild animals kept for exhibition, or by extension, any diverse or miscellaneous group. From French ménagerie, from ménager ("to manage a household"), from ménage ("household"), ultimately from Latin mansio ("a staying, dwelling"), first attested in English c. 1712. Unlike a "zoo," which implies a modern, public institution for scientific study, or an "assemblage," a blandly general term, a menagerie is a private spectacle of captured marvels, an expression of power and peculiarity. It is the scent of straw and musk in a nobleman's courtyard, the parrot shrieking from a gilded stand, the lion pacing on straw-strewn stone—the beautiful and the imprisoned, a testament to the human urge to curate the world's wildness into a manageable, and profoundly lonely, tableau.
Etymology
From French ménagerie, derived from ménager (“to keep house”), household. Housekeeping used to include taking care of domestic animals.
noun
- A collection of live wild animals as an exhibition historically associated with the aristocracy and considered a precursor of modern zoos.
- The enclosure where they are kept.“In Sacramento a crazed woman opened the cages of a circus menagerie for fear the animals might starve to death, and had been mauled by a lioness.”
- A diverse or miscellaneous group.“[Brigitte] Bardot, the stunning, desirable beauty who once stood for sexual freedom for women, spent the latter part of her life at her home near Saint Tropez with her husband and a menagerie of pets.”
- The orchestra of a theatre.
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