The speaker..excoriated the keepers and directors of the animal exhibit as mere..ex-saloon keepers whose knowledge of Zoo-keeping stopped with their mastery of the art of drawing salaries.
Catholic World January 438/1
1993
Bostock's book is an unusual combination of zookeeping and philosophy which seeks to address what he terms the ‘special challenge to zoos’: the right to freedom for animals.
New Scientist 16 October 44/1
2001
Getting animals used to the presence of humans is at the heart of the art and science of zookeeping.
Y. Martel, Life of Pi (2002) ix. 39
Frequency
zookeeping typically occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
zookeeping is in frequency band 2, which contains words occurring between 0.001 and 0.01 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 zookeeping, n., 1960–2010
* 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
1960
0.0011
1970
0.0013
1980
0.0015
1990
0.0015
2000
0.0017
2010
0.002
Originally published as part of the entry for zoo, n.