Peryton

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A legendary beast from mythology that combines the features of a winged bird and a deer
2. An ancient creature characterized by its deer-like body and robust wings, celebrated in folklore
3. A fantastical animal known for blending the body of a deer with the wings of a bird

Etymology: The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges invented the creature that became "peryton" in his Book of Imaginary Beings, though he never gave it an English name. Borges wrote in Spanish and described a bird-deer, which he called "peritio." When the translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni rendered the book into English, he turned that Spanish coinage into "peryton," so the English word was itself a translator's invention, not a term drawn from any older myth or language. The creature has no ancient pedigree behind it. Borges's invention, and di Giovanni's rendering of it, gave English a name for a monster that existed only on the page, a fanciful hybrid of deer and bird. The word later escaped the literary setting. Astrophysicists adopted "peryton" as a term in their field, first in a paper by S. Burke-Spolaor and colleagues, showing how a name conceived as pure imagination can be borrowed for a serious technical purpose.