Echolocations

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The biological sonar used by certain animals to navigate and hunt by emitting sounds that reflect off objects
2. A mechanism employed by some species, particularly bats and dolphins, to determine the location of items through sound wave reflection
3. The process through which animals utilize sound signals to identify and locate surrounding objects by interpreting echoes returning to them

Etymology: "Echolocations" is simply the plural of "echolocation," so the story belongs to the singular. The noun was coined by the American zoologist Donald Griffin in 1944, and he built it from two existing English words: "echo," the reflected sound, and "location," the act of finding or fixing a position. The result describes a way of finding things by listening to returning sound, which Griffin studied in bats and was reaching for a name for. The "echo" half traces back through Latin and Greek to a nymph of Greek myth, Echo, who could only repeat the last words spoken to her. Griffin's coinage therefore joins a mythological figure of repetition to the everyday idea of pinpointing where something is.