zoo

Etymology

Clipping of zoological garden or zoological park, now the usual form. See zoology.

noun

1. A park where live animals are exhibited.
   The San Juan market is Mexico City's most famous deli of exotic meats, where an adventurous shopper can hunt down hard-to-find critters such as ostrich, wild boar and crocodile. Only the city zoo offers greater species diversity. 2013-07-26, Nick Miroff, “Mexico gets a taste for eating insects …”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 7, page 32
2. (informal, figurative) Any place that is wild, crowded, or chaotic.
   The shopping center was a zoo the week before Christmas.
3. (informal, figurative) A large and varied collection of something.
   After his insightful book The Art of Alfred Hitchcock, Spoto published The Dark Side of Genius, a portrayal of the elderly director as a lonely man who was a veritable zoo of desires, suspicions, fears, and addictions (food, drink, romantic infatuation, and filmmaking). 1993, Neil P. Hurley, Soul in Suspense: Hitchcock's Fright and Delight, page xii
   From this point on, an entire zoo of possibilities arose: strange stars, different families of neutron stars, hybrid stars, etc. 2001, Antonino Zichichi, Theory and Experiment Heading for New Physics
   But powerful as the quark model and the electroweak theory were in describing the zoo of subatomic particles, this still left a huge gap. 2021, Michio Kaku, The God Equation
4. (US, military, slang) The jungle.
   I'm not all that unhappy about being out on an actual patrol, but there's a worried feeling wandering around the back of my mind, not exactly fear, more like a sort of lurking anxiety at being out in the dreaded jungle, the zoo, where the enemy hides. 2013, E. E. "Doc" Murdock, My Vietnam War (page 152)
5. (slang) A zoophile.
   Zoophiles, or 'zoos,' are sexually and emotionally attracted to animals, as in a sexual orientation. 2013, Mark Hawthorne, Bleating Hearts: The Hidden World of Animal Suffering
   Bestiality or zoophilia—whatever we decide to call it—is one of the most pressing issues for all domesticated animals, […] From the scanty research available, the following picture emerges: the majority of zoos are male, though certainly not all; […] 2016, Jessica Pierce, Run, Spot, Run: The Ethics of Keeping Pets, page 129