Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The scientific study of animal behavior, especially as it occurs in a natural environment.
  • noun The study of human ethos and its formation.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The science of ethics; especially, applied ethics.
  • noun Mimicry.
  • noun Same as æcology.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A treatise on morality; ethics.
  • noun The science of the formation of character, national and collective as well as individual.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun zoology The scientific study of human and animal behaviour.
  • noun obsolete The study of the human ethos.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the branch of zoology that studies the behavior of animals in their natural habitats

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[French éthologie, from Latin ēthologia, art of depicting character, from Greek ēthologiā : ēthos, character; see ethos + logos, speech, expression; see –logy.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From the Latin ēthologia ("the art of depicting or imitating character"), from the Ancient Greek ἠθολογία (ēthologia, "painting of character, especially by mimic gestures"), from ἠθολόγος (ēthologos, "painting character by mimic gestures"), from ἦθος (ēthos, "character”, especially “moral character").

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Examples

  • Male bonding is a term that is used in ethology, social science, and in general usage to describe patterns of friendship and/or cooperation in men (or in the case of ethology: males of various species).

    Male Bonding « bollywoods most wanted photographerno1 2008

  • Their breeding behaviour and how they and their chicks respond to stimuli is tremendously well studied, with the studies of Goethe, Tinbergen and others being classic, pioneering works in ethology.

    Archive 2006-02-01 Darren Naish 2006

  • Griffin's agenda for the discipline he labeled “cognitive ethology” features the topic of animal consciousness and advocates a methodology, inherited from classical ethology, that is based in naturalistic observations of animal behavior (see Allen 2004).

    Animal Consciousness Allen, Colin 2006

  • And he believes that we can also arrive at a science of development, which he refers to as "ethology"; this is a description of the ways in which circumstances influence individual character.

    John Stuart Mill as a social science founder Daniel Little 2009

  • And he believes that we can also arrive at a science of development, which he refers to as "ethology"; this is a description of the ways in which circumstances influence individual character.

    Archive 2009-08-01 Daniel Little 2009

  • "ethology," as above defined, would be good names for our present work.

    Folkways A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals William Graham Sumner 1875

  • J.S. Mill, or with ethology, meaning environmentalism, as used by Julian Huxley), its roots are deep in the history of thought.

    Dictionary of the History of Ideas W. SLUCKIN 1968

  • Donald Griffin, often called the "father of cognitive ethology" the study of animal minds, postulated that the ability of animals to adapt to unpredictably changing conditions showed they were conscious and able to assess what needed to be done in a given situation.

    Marc Bekoff: Animal Minds and the Foible of Human Exceptionalism Marc Bekoff 2011

  • Donald Griffin, often called the "father of cognitive ethology" the study of animal minds, postulated that the ability of animals to adapt to unpredictably changing conditions showed they were conscious and able to assess what needed to be done in a given situation.

    Marc Bekoff: Animal Minds and the Foible of Human Exceptionalism Marc Bekoff 2011

  • Best provides a comprehensive review of recent research in cognitive ethology to support his argument that we do indeed share many traits with other animals.

    Marc Bekoff: Animal Minds and the Foible of Human Exceptionalism Marc Bekoff 2011

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