A person responsible for taking care of the animals in a zoo; (sometimes also) the owner, director, or person in overall charge of a zoo.
1886
It could be nursed and fed on warm milk..if Zoo keepers will have an eye to it.
Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago) 3 November 2
1910
Zoo is getting too crowded with all kinds of animals and I don't need so many dongola goats. I will sell you two for fifty dollars..Dennis Toole, Zoo keeper.
E. P. Butler, Water Goats & Other Troubles 19
1977
Zookeepers caring for a two-week-old orphaned hippopotamus have taken to..wading into a pool..to nurse the hippo from a bottle.
Monitor (McAllen, Texas) 17 July 2f/4
1991
The eccentric British millionaire zoo-keeper and former casino owner.
Sunday Times (Nexis) 2 June (Overseas news section)
2009
Zookeepers have helped hatch the eggs of one of the world's rarest species of turtle.
zookeeper typically occurs about 0.06 times per million words in modern written English.
zookeeper is in frequency band 3, which contains words occurring between 0.01 and 0.1 times per million words in modern written English. More about OED's frequency bands
Frequency data is computed programmatically, and should be regarded as an estimate.
Frequency of zookeeper, n., 1910–2010
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Historical frequency series are derived from Google Books Ngrams (version 2), a data set based on the Google Books corpus of several million books printed in English between 1500 and 2010.
The overall frequency for a given word is calculated by summing frequencies for the main form of the word, any plural or inflected forms, and any major spelling variations.
For sets of homographs (distinct entries that share the same word-form, e.g. mole, n.¹, mole, n.², mole, n.³, etc.), we have estimated the frequency of each homograph entry as a fraction of the total Ngrams frequency for the word-form. This may result in inaccuracies.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the Google Books corpus.
Decade
Frequency per million words
1910
0.0029
1920
0.0055
1930
0.0079
1940
0.012
1950
0.02
1960
0.03
1970
0.043
1980
0.055
1990
0.061
2000
0.07
2010
0.078
Frequency of zookeeper, n., 2017–2024
* Occurrences per million words in written English
Modern frequency series are derived from a corpus of 20 billion words, covering the period from 2017 to the present. The corpus is mainly compiled from online news sources, and covers all major varieties of World English.
Smoothing has been applied to series for lower-frequency words, using a moving-average algorithm. This reduces short-term fluctuations, which may be produced by variability in the content of the corpus.
Period
Frequency per million words
2017
0.36
2018
0.4
2019
0.4
2020
0.37
2021
0.36
2022
0.36
2023
0.33
2024
0.3
Originally published as part of the entry for zoo, n.