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woolly mammoth

woolly mammoth

4 5.2
A large extinct elephant with thick fur that lived in cold areas during the Ice Age
  • noun
  • /ˈwʊli ˈmæməθ/
translation icon : mamut lanudo
  • A mother and daughter peer through enormous woolly mammoth tusks lodged in permafrost at the Discovery Channel's Prehistoric Worlds exhibit.
  • woolly mammoths and reindeer

They're seeking to restore lost ecosystems and use gene editing to restore the woolly mammoth to the Arctic tundra.

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Examples

  • Sometimes it's a woolly mammoth, frozen for thousands of years in the icy ground.

    Blog text (32)
  • Spear-toting hunters chased bison or surrounded a woolly mammoth in some of the images, while other paintings depicted tribal life in the Paleolithic and Neolithic.

    Academic text (2009)
  • Do you know someone's trying to clone a woolly mammoth?

  • Typical animals hunted by Lucy would have been wild horses, woolly mammoths, reindeer, and rhinos.

    Academic text (1999)
  • They're seeking to restore lost ecosystems and use gene editing to restore the woolly mammoth to the Arctic tundra.

  • Paleontologists believe Wrangel is also the last place where woolly mammoths lived.

  • Researchers deciphered the genomes of two woolly mammoths that died about 20,000 and 60,000 years ago.

  • The Peak: Things got pretty quiet in these parts after the woolly mammoths disappeared about 10,000 years ago.

Synonyms

mammoth
vswoolly mammoth
47 5.5

A very large, hairy elephant that lived long ago with curved tusks

is the specific northern, thick-coated species rather than the whole group
Mammuthus primigenius
vswoolly mammoth
  • Specialized
9.3

A large, hairy extinct elephant that lived in cold northern areas during the Ice Age

is the everyday English name rather than a scientific label
northern mammoth
vswoolly mammoth
9.0

A very large, hairy animal like an elephant that lived in cold northern places

is the same species known for a thick coat during the Ice Age

Surface Forms

Morphology

woolly + mammoth

The noun phrase is fully compositional: 'woolly' (having a thick, wool-like coat) modifies 'mammoth' (a prehistoric elephant), so the meaning 'a mammoth with a thick coat of hair' is directly derivable from the parts. This is a standard adjective + noun description common cross-linguistically and would be immediately understandable to a B1 learner who knows both constituents.

Etymology

Woolly mammoth: The name woolly mammoth shows the animal's look: woolly means 'covered in thick hair', and mammoth was a word people used for very large animals whose tusks were often found buried in the ground. So the name makes you picture a huge, hairy elephant from the Ice Age, which is the animal we mean today.