CG: n

S: NCBI (last access: 13 December 2025); EBSCO (last access: 13 December 2025)

N: 1. late 17c., «mimicry, art of depicting characters by mimic gestures,» from Latin ethologia, from Greek ēthologia, from ēthos «character» (see ethos). Taken by Mill as «science of character formation» (1843); as a branch of zoology, «study of instincts,» from 1897. Related: Ethological.

2. ethology, the study of animal behaviour. Although many naturalists have studied aspects of animal behaviour through the centuries, the modern science of ethology is usually considered to have arisen as a discrete discipline with the work in the 1920s of biologists Nikolaas Tinbergen of the Netherlands and Konrad Lorenz of Austria. Ethology is a combination of laboratory and field science, with strong ties to certain other disciplines—e.g., neuroanatomy, ecology, evolution. The ethologist is interested in the behavioral process rather than in a particular animal group and often studies one type of behaviour (e.g., aggression) in a number of unrelated animals.

3. animal behaviour, the concept, broadly considered, referring to everything animals do, including movement and other activities and underlying mental processes. Human fascination with animal behaviour probably extends back millions of years, perhaps even to times before the ancestors of the species became human in the modern sense. Initially, animals were probably observed for practical reasons because early human survival depended on knowledge of animal behaviour.

4. Animal Behaviour: ethology.

[The science concerned with the] study of the behaviour of animals in their normal environment, including all the processes, both internal and external, by which they respond to changes in their environment.

5. Cultural Interrelation:

We can mention the book Vergleichende Verhaltensforschung: Grundlagen der Ethologie (1978) by Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989), publication known in English as The Foundations of Ethology (1981).

S: 1. Etymonline (13 December 2025). 2 & 3. EncBrit (13 December 2025). 4. TERMIUM PLUS (13 December 2025). 5. Springer (13 December 2025).

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CR: etiology, thanatosis.