Emotional attachment to, or love of, animals; opposition to cruelty to animals. Also occasionally: sexual attraction to, or activity with, animals. Now chiefly historical and somewhat rare.
1830
It is gratifying to meet with the following traits of zoophily in the character of one of our great national saints.
W. H. Drummond, Humanity to Animals 47
1889
Old cats and dogs..are kept alive through a somewhat misguided philanthropy or rather zoophily.
British Medical Journal 3 August 256/1
1903
The extremer advocates of Zoophily.
Month August 214
1976
In 1930 a law removed adultery, homosexuality, and zoophily from the [Danish] Penal Code.
Biology. The tendency of a parasitic organism (esp. a mosquito) to prefer feeding or living on animals rather than humans; the state of being zoophilic (zoophilicadj. 3). Cf. zoophilousadj. 2.
1928
The author first reviews earlier studies of the subject of zoophily in Anopheles.
Exper. Station Rec. (U.S. Department of Agriculture) vol. 58 262
1938
There are thus among different species of mosquitoes degrees of zoophily and anthrophily.
Journal of Parasitologyvol. 24 93
1983
For simplicity in this discussion we have ignored the effect of zoophily, multiple feeding and the possibility that some individual flies may extend the duration of the gonotrophic cycle long enough to be infective after one cycle.
Journal Applied Ecologyvol. 20 510
2002
The high degree of zoophily coupled with the mostly outdoor feeding behavior during the summer, makes the likelihood for local malaria transmission by A[nopheles]messeae remote.
Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛtl/ but /ˈpɛtl̩i/.
Vowels
iːfleece
ihappy
ɪkit
ɛdress
atrap, bath
ɑːstart, palm, bath
ɒlot
ɔːthought, force
ʌstrut
ʊfoot
uːgoose
əletter
əːnurse
ɪənear
ɛːsquare
ʊəcure
eɪface
ʌɪpride
aʊmouth
əʊgoat
ɔɪvoice
ãgratin
ɒ̃salon
ᵻ(/ɪ/-/ə/)
ᵿ(/ʊ/-/ə/)
Other symbols
The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress.
The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress.
Round brackets ( ) in a transcription indicate that the symbol within the brackets is optional.
Some consonants can take the function of the vowel in unstressed syllables. Where necessary, a syllabic marker diacritic is used, hence /ˈpɛd(ə)l/ but /ˈpɛdl̩i/.
Vowels
ifleece, happy
ɪkit
ɛdress
ætrap, bath
ɑlot, palm, cloth, thought
ɑrstart
ɔcloth, thought
ɔrnorth, force
ʊfoot
ugoose
əstrut, comma
ərnurse, letter
ɪ(ə)rnear
ɛ(ə)rsquare
ʊ(ə)rcure
eɪface
aɪpride
aʊmouth
oʊgoat
ɔɪvoice
ɑ̃gratin
æ̃salon
ᵻ(/ɪ/-/ə/)
ᵿ(/ʊ/-/ə/)
Other symbols
The symbol ˈ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with primary stress.
The symbol ˌ at the beginning of a syllable indicates that that syllable is pronounced with secondary stress.
Round brackets ( ) in a transcription indicate that the symbol within the brackets is optional.
Simple text respell breaks words into syllables, separated by a hyphen. The syllable which carries the primary stress is written in capital letters. This key covers both British and U.S. English Simple Text Respell.
Consonants
b, d, f, h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w and z have their standard English values
zoophily typically occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
zoophily 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 zoophily, n., 1890–2010
* 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
1890
0.0012
1900
0.0016
1910
0.0019
1920
0.0031
1930
0.0032
1940
0.0037
1950
0.0041
1960
0.0041
1970
0.0038
1980
0.0035
1990
0.0024
2000
0.0025
2010
0.002
Originally published as part of the entry for zoophile, n.