So, what are faunamorphs, floramorphs and furthermorphs?
The Faunamorph & Floramorph Lexicon is a vast collection of thousands of words and expressions – lovingly gathered over more than three decades of linguistic sleuthing. It’s a living archive of how nature meanders into human language and thought – like underground rivers or vines spiraling through the forest of our imagination.
“Faunamorph”
A word or phrase that refers to or reflects fauna (animals) in order to describe something other than that animal.
“Floramorph”
A word or phrase that refers to or reflects flora (plant-life) in order to describe something other than that plant.
“Furthermorph”
A word or phrase that refers to things and phenomena in nature that are not faunamorphs or floramorphs.
Ready to talk turkey? Then let’s not beat around the bush. At one time or another, we’ve probably all used the term “anthropomorphic” or “anthropomorphize” – i.e., to attribute human behavior or characteristics to a being or object not human, especially an animal. Project leaders coined the neologism “Faunamorph” in a lakeside cabin in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota in 1989. The term “Floramorph” was coined in 1995 and “Furthermorph” in 2025 (all rights reserved for these three terms and their adjectives.)
Just as we humans tend to anthropomorphize animals, we have a strong penchant to “faunamorphize” one another. We love to ascribe animal forms, attributes, behaviors, and traits to humans. When we do so, we employ words or phrases that can be called faunamorphs (my very own, patented/copyrighted, neologism). And the Fauna Morph and Floramorph Lexicon collects and categorizes many thousands of examples as a result of 33 years of ferreting out peachy words and phrases.
