animal

1. 1.

   marked by the appetites and passions of the body

   “animal instincts”

   “carnal knowledge”

   “fleshly desire”

   “a sensual delight in eating”

   “music is the only sensual pleasure without vice”

   Synonymscarnalfleshlysensual

   Similarphysical

Other forms of animal

plural

animals·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about animal

What does animal mean?

animal means "a living organism characterized by voluntary movement". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in animal?

animal has 3 syllables: an-i-mal. The stress falls on "an". In IPA it is /ˈænəməl/.

What is another word for animal?

Close synonyms include animate being, beast, brute, creature, fauna. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is animal a common word?

animal is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.