Word of the week: Dinosaur

Dinosaur (noun)
[dī-nə-ˌsȯr]

“Where does the word dinosaur come from? It was actually coined by the scientist Sir Richard Owen, who had been studying various fossils found of these creatures and he came to the conclusion that they were from a group of large extinct reptiles. So he classified them as Dinosauria. This was coined from ‘deinos’, the Greek word for ‘terrible’ and ‘sauros’ which means ‘lizard’. Specific dinosaurs were subsequently named by some kind of description. Like ‘triceratops’ is literally ‘three-horned face’ and that’s a combo of ‘tri’ (three), ‘keras’ (horn) and ‘ops’ (face). The giant tyrannosaur came from the word ‘tyrannos’ which means, unsurprisingly, ‘tyrant’.”

To hear Valerie and Allison chat more about this and more on the world of writing, blogging and publishing, check out this week’s podcast episode.