| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. |
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| Amazon |
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| SYLLABICATION: | Am·a·zon |
| PRONUNCIATION: |   m  -z n , -zn |
| NOUN: | 1. Greek Mythology A member of a nation of women warriors reputed to have lived in Scythia. 2. often amazon A tall, aggressive, strong-willed woman. 3. A small green parrot of the genus Amazona, having a short tail and red-and-blue wings, native to Central and South America. | | ETYMOLOGY: | Middle English, from Latin Am z n, from Greek Amazn, probably of Iranian origin. | | WORD HISTORY: | In classical legend the Amazons were a tribe of warrior women. Their name is supposedly derived from Greek a-mazos, “without a breast,” because according to the legend they cut off their right breasts so as to be better able to shoot with a bow and arrow. This folk etymology, like most folk etymologies, is incorrect, but the Amazons of legend are not so completely different from the historical Amazons, who were also warriors. The historical Amazons were Scythians, an Iranian people renowned for their cavalry. The first Greeks to come into contact with the Iranians were the Ionians, who lived on the coast of Asia Minor and were constantly threatened by the Persians, the most important of the Iranian peoples. Amazn is the Ionian Greek form of the Iranian word ha-mazan, “fighting together.” The regular Greek form would be hamazn, but because the Ionians dropped their aitches like Cockneys, hamazn became amazn, the form taken into the other Greek dialects.
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| The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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