oestrus: [17] Greek oistros had an extraordinarily wide range of meanings, from ‘madness, frenzy’ through ‘sting’ to ‘gadfly’, and including also ‘breeze’. If, as has been suggested, it is related to Latin īra ‘a(chǎn)nger’ (source of English ire [13]), Lithuanian aistra ‘passion’, etc, ‘frenzy’ is presumably the primary sense, but in fact English originally adopted it (via Latin oestrus) as the genus name for a variety of horsefly or botfly. ‘Sting’ was taken up, in the sense ‘impetus, goad’, as a learned borrowing in the mid-19th century (‘They too were pricked by the oestrus of intellectual responsibility’, John Morley, On Compromise 1874), but oestrus was not used for ‘period of sexual receptiveness in female animals’ (based of course on the notion of sexual ‘frenzy’) until the end of the 19th century.
The derived oestrogen dates from the 1920s. => ire
oestrus (n.)
see estrus.
雙語例句
1. Male peacock: Bah, you are mean, old love sees my oestrus!
雄孔雀: 呸, 你們下流, 老愛看我發(fā)情!
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2. He increased the reproduction rate of rabbits by inducing oestrus.
他使用催情的方法來提高兔子的繁殖率.
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3. The duration and the interval of post - partum oestrus were 33.0 hours and 76.6 dars repectively.