A small carpet shark of the Indo-Pacific, Stegostoma fasciatum (family Stegostomatidae), the adult of which has a pale body with numerous small dark spots.
Named from the juvenile, which has a dark body with pale vertical stripes and was formerly thought to be a different species.
1804
Zebra Shark... Squalus tigrinus... Of a dark brown colour,..barred with..milk-white,..somewhat undulating stripes.
G. Shaw, General Zoologyvol. V. 352
1911
Among several allied genera is the zebra-shark (Stegostoma tigrinum) of the Indian Ocean.
Harmsworth Natural History 1689/1
2016
There were eight zebra sharks born last year and we had six of them so it was a great achievement.
zebra shark typically occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
zebra shark 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 zebra shark, n., 1800–2010
* 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
1800
0.0003
1810
0.0004
1820
0.0004
1830
0.0004
1840
0.0002
1850
0.0003
1860
0.0003
1870
0.0003
1880
0.0001
1890
0.0001
1900
0.0001
1910
0.0001
1920
0.00005
1930
0.00008
1940
0.00008
1950
0.0002
1960
0.0005
1970
0.0008
1980
0.0012
1990
0.0014
2000
0.0017
2010
0.002
Originally published as part of the entry for zebra, n.