Metaphor Zoo: Why the English Language Loves Animals

Ever wondered why it rains cats and dogs? Why some are early birds and others night owls? Or why on earth a cat would wear pyjamas?
'Charming, scholarly, boisterously playful, thoroughly engaging.' Benjamin Dreyer, bestselling author of Dreyer's English

English is home to a veritable menagerie of animal metaphors, similes, sayings, adages, proverbs, idioms and rhymes, ranging from the commonsense to the utterly absurd. From curious cats to mindless sheeple, lexicographer Jeremy Butterfield takes a species-by-species safari through the English language in pursuit of its most unusual animal idioms.

Learn how coots – perfectly nice little birds – become synonymous with madness, baldness and idiocy. Figure out if bees actually have knees, and if so, why they’re so great. And discover why pigs ‘oink’ in English, ‘khankhanah’ in Arabic, ‘heng heng’ in Mandarin – but cats always mew. Filled to the brim with fascinating facts and trivia, The Metaphor Zoo is the perfect gift for language lovers, amateur linguists and grammar nerds alike.

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'You’ll savour every fauna-fuelled page... enchanting.' Vanessa Feltz

'Joyous, fascinating and utterly delightful.' Stephen Moss, author of The Accidental Countryside

'The English language is crawling, hopping, slithering and soaring with animal words. The Metaphor Zoo lets them all run wild, to glorious effect.' Sally Coulthard, author of A Short History of the World According to Sheep