zoo

UK/zʉw/US/zuː/

nounA1Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,994 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: zoos

A zoo is the place where wild animals live in the city so people can see them. Go to the zoo, zoo keeper, a good zoo.

Modern ones justify themselves by conservation and breeding programmes rather than display, and some species survive only because of them — though the argument about whether that pays for the captivity is a live one. The word is a shortening of zoological garden. Note that a zoo is also any scene of noisy chaos.

Definitions of zoo

1nounzooA place where wild animals are kept for people to see.A1
“We took the kids to the zoo to see the elephants and giraffes.”

zoo is a place.

Where it comes from

A clipping of zoological garden, from Greek zoion, an animal. Zoology and zodiac come from the same animal.

a clipping of zoological garden,zoological park, now the usual form. See zoology.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in In the City

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zoo in the wild

According to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA), there are over 10,000 zoos worldwide.
List of zoos by country
Globally there are an estimated 700 million visitors a year to zoos.
List of zoos by country
London Zoo, previously known as ZSL London Zoo or London Zoological Gardens and sometimes called Regent's Park Zoo, is the world's oldest scientific zoo.
London Zoo
The Bronx Zoo (also historically the Bronx Zoological Park and the Bronx Zoological Gardens) is a zoo within Bronx Park in the Bronx, New York City.
Bronx Zoo
The zoo has 2.1 million average yearly visitors as of 2009.
Bronx Zoo

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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zoo