Word for "animals, including humans"?

Question

Commonly, "animals" means "all animals, except humans". So is there a single word for "animals, including humans"?

Particularly, if you had a list of two choices, animal or human, what would you write as the heading?

Context: I'm building an input form for game designers to fill out about things you can encounter in a fantasy world. And one property of an encounter is whether it's an encounter with humans, animals, and possibly more categories to be determined later (e.g. spirits, monsters, undead?).

Answer 1

This is a tricky one because people differ in what they consider to be an animal. Not only that but a biological dictionary would give a different answer from an everyday dictionary.

Some would say that humans are distinct from animals. (creationists for example)

Some would say that humans are animals. (evolutionists for example)

Some don't include lizards as animals. Others don't include insects.

It depends whether you want a technical answer or not.

Some suggestions

Technical

chordates

animalia

eukaryotes

Non-technical

beings

creatures

etc.

Answer 2

Q: Is there a single word for "animals, including humans"?

A: Humans are included in the Kingdom Animalia

Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia (also called Metazoa). All animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and independently, at some point in their lives. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their lives. All animals are heterotrophs: they must ingest other organisms or their products for sustenance. (Wikipedia, Animalia)

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Domain Eukarya - Kingdom Animalia - Phylum Chordata - Subphylum Vertebrata - Class Mammalia - Order Primates - Family Hominidae - Genus Homo - Species Sapien

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Order Primates

The primates belong to the class Mammalia. They show all of the normal features of mammals, including hair and mammary glands for nursing the young. They are endothermic, have vertebrae and a skeleton, and are segmented deuterosomes, with a coelom made from an outgrowth of the digestive tract. Primates are eutherians, meaning that they have a placenta that provides a more intimate relationship between mother and child while the mother nurses the child. Eutherians are also the mammals with the longest relationship between mother and young. The above features make the animals of the order Primates also eutherians, mammals, vertebrates, and chordates.

There are 13 families in the order Primates.

Family Hominidae - humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans

http://classic.sidwell.edu/us/science/vlb5/Labs/Classification_Lab/Eukarya/Animalia/Chordata/Vertebrata/Mammalia/Primates/)

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Q: [I]f you had a list of two choices, animal or human, what would you write as the heading?

A: If I had to choose between Human or Animal, my choice would be Animal.

(My language choice is, admittedly, informed by philosophical, ethical and political concerns. I think that maintaining the conceit [embedded in our common language] that the distinctions which differentiate Homo sapiens from the other members of Hominidae are sufficient to justify an exclusive categorization, has lately been ... counterproductive.)

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Supplemental: In the context of the categories involved with game development, perhaps Human, Animal, and Life-form or Entity (mortal and non-mortal).

Answer 3

In your case of a fantasy game, a common word for this category might be 'mortals'.

Answer 4

Humans are a variety of living beings called mammals. This puts us in the same category as mice, dogs, cats, cows, pigs, sheep, monkeys, and any other species that:

• is warm-blooded

• breathes air

• gives birth to live young

• suckles their young

(mammal comes from the same root word as mammary, which means a female breast capable of producing milk).

This leaves out bugs, spiders, snakes & lizards (reptiles), frogs, toads (amphibians), birds, fish, and other sea creatures (except dolphins and whales, which are mammals).

If you want to include all animals along with humans, you could say living beings (most people would not think this includes plants).

If you want to emphasize that humans can think and feel, you could group them only with those animals we consider to have some capacity for thinking and feeling, by saying sentient beings. (There will be some dispute as to which species this includes.)

Answer 5

I'd personally just use "Fauna". The phrase "Flora & Fauna" is commonly used terminology to refer to "Plants & Animals".

Answer 6

If you wanted to differentiate between animals and humans, you could call the two categories creatures and humans. However, if you wanted to distinguish between animals (including humans) and other categories such as plants, it would be fine to label humans as animals. I say this because it is not uncommon to hear that all natural things fall into one of three categories: animal, vegetable or mineral (you could add further fantasy categories as required). And besides, technically speaking, humans are animals.

Answer 7

I find that it often helps to translate a word into another language (you can use Google translate if you do not speak the language) and get new ideas or input that way. Other languages have a different way of describing something, and that can be helpful.

For example the German language has the word Lebewesen, a literal translation of which is: "living being." In the German language it is understood that this word describes anything that is "alive"; therefore, it includes humans, animals, plants, flowers, but not viruses. From that idea I realized that you could also call something a "breathing being," as both humans and animals do breathe, but that would exclude the plants because they do not breathe. But as someone else has accurately noted, both humans and animals do breathe as well as move, but plants usually do not move by their own choice and free will.

Google translates the German word Lebewesen with "creature," "living thing," "created entity," and "beast." Living organism is another translation that comes very close.

Beast is a bit of "weird" translation of the word because humans are only called beasts when they behave badly. An animal can easily be called a beast, but plants or flowers are almost never called beasts. So that word leaves room for discussion.

A breathing being in french would be "être respirer."

The German language also uses the words Zweibeiner and Vierbeiner, meaning a two-legged or a four-legged being/creature. That of course, does make the distinction between a human and an animal. Even though there are rare animals that seem to be able to walk upright (e.g., kangaroos, monkeys, koala bears) in the German language a "two-legged creature" is almost always a complicated way of saying "human," so that word lends itself very easily to making the distinction between a human and an animal. Translated into French, the two-legged or four-legged creature becomes bipède ("two-footed being") and quadrupède ("four-footed being") respectively.

So the term "living creature" encompasses humans, animals and plants. (in the strict biology sence it even encompasses bacteria because they have cells and do pro-create it excludes virusses because they not not have cells and can not digest or pro-create themselves without the use of a host cell)

The term "created creature" can also mean robots or engineered viruses.

The label "breathing creature" applies only to humans and animals.

"Walking creature" could again include mobile robots.

"Living thing" labels humans, animals, plants, but also viruses and bacteria well, because they all live and change.

It is very typical for the English language to have a discussion abouth wheater or not humans are the result of evolution or are created by God. In most European languages there is no confussion about that.

In the German language for example, the word Kreatur is often used to imply that a human has an unpleasant character or that we are looking at something that is alive but we are totally uncertain as to the origin of the thing we've called "Kreatur". Therefore that particular word lends itself to all sorts of creatures or beasts or monsters from the literatue of science fiction. Something like Frankenstein's monster would, for example, be called a Kreatur but not a human.

I would strongly advise that you look up all sorts of words on Google translate and try to find something in another language that describes exactly what are you are looking for. You could easily introduce a foreign word in your game to describe a "breathing two- or four-legged being"

So what you are looking for is a word that describes the ability to move and breathe.

The word Lebewesen as I rembember it from biology lessons, means anything that is alive and breathes and has the ability to pro-create (even plants have that) but excludes viruses because in order to be considered a "living being" it needs to have at least one cell. Monocellular life forms are supposed to be the very first stage of life in the "evolution soup" theory of abiogenesis. To create the simplest of cells requires, among other things, a minimum of 20 different types of proteins, oxygen, and electricity.

Viruses do not have any cells. Bacteria do have cells.

P.S. Flora is is the goddess of flowering plants, and "fauna" refers to animals specifically of a certain time or region. "Flora" and "fauna" therefore means plants and animals and leaves out humans. Furthermore "flora" and "fauna" are understood to be plant and animal life in English, German, French and Dutch. It is not at all a way to describe humans but excludes them.

Answer 8

Well, in MMO programming terms, you have a MOB, short for MObile OBject, but that includes robots, ghosts, and zombies.

Answer 9

A real difficulty with this question is the gradual grading of "animals" per se into things that are "animal-ish" (to coin a word), especially since the boundary has been shifting back and forth quite a bit recently due to advances in gene sequencing technology. Little creepy-crawlies like choanoflagellates and Ministeria vibrans are really muddying the water.

That said, try metazoans

Metazoan: Any of numerous heterotrophic eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Metazoa, characteristically having a multicellular body with cells differentiated into tissues; an animal.

Answer 10

Mammals?

any animal that gives birth to live babies, not eggs, and feeds its young on milk. Cows, humans and whales are all mammals. (Oxford)

By animal, I'm assuming you mean what we commonly call animals

1.2 A mammal, as opposed to a bird, reptile, fish, or insect:

Answer 11

Speaking as a programmer, if you might later add "spirits", "monsters", "undead" to this list alongside "human" and "(other) animal", then you do not want to start with a word that means "animals, including humans". You'll have to change it the first time you add anything. Rather, the heading should be type of antagonist, or enemy type, or something like that, since that's what this part of the form is for.

Speaking as a user of fantasy fiction, if you're building a hierarchy, and you want a category that includes both "humans" and "other animals" as sub-categories, then in future you'll add more categories outside and potentially inside this category, then perhaps call it mundane, to contrast with your supernatural monsters, undead, demons, and whatnot.

There's some potential quibbling in your future: plants aren't animals. But mundane plants usually also don't constitute an "encounter" in a game, so that might be OK. So, should plant antagonists be considered "mundane", and do you want them in this category alongside "humans", or elsewhere? If the answers to those questions don't match then "mundane" is no good, but if you're willing to put plants alongside animals in this category then you're OK, and if you're willing to consider any plant worthy of an "encounter" to be magical then you're also OK.

Other possible quibble: wizards are humans but they aren't mundane. You'd be relying on your users to understand that your hierarchy relates only to the species of the beings involved in the encounter, and that human is a "mundane species" even though some humans are magical.

Furthermore, a common word in fantasy for "animal, excluding humans" is beast. Since you're worried about the whole business of whether humans are considered animals or not, it might be best not to use the word "animal" anywhere in the taxonomy.

Answer 12

It may help to remember that this problem is by no means special. The English language, just like most if not all languages, is full of examples where a larger category includes a special subcategory that is sometimes considered as such and sometimes as an opposite. Some examples:

• Technically, humans are clearly animals, but when a hunter says that before shooting he wants to go sure it's an animal moving in the bush, then we can assume he is contrasting animal with human.
• According to current biological definitions, mushrooms are not plants. But in general language this is not so clear. If collecting wild plants is forbidden somewhere, it's safe to assume you will get into trouble when you collect mushrooms. On the other hand, if you ask a child whether a drawing represents a plant, you might well get the response: "No, it's a mushroom."
• The meat of fish is not meat but fish, though no doubt some regulations concerning meat will include fish. (A very notable one doesn't: For the purposes of Catholic fasting on Fridays, fish is famously not included in meat.)
• An armchair is a kind of chair, but if you asked for a chair so you can reach the ceiling and remove a spider web, you won't appreciate being brought an armchair: "Didn't I say I want a chair? Did I mention an armchair?"
• A dog house and a doll house are of course houses; but if they are all the houses you own, don't be surprised to be called a liar when you claim to own houses.
• Speaking of liars: Technically, a single lie makes one a liar in context. It takes children a while to learn that it is not wise to use that technical definition with their parents because the term is usually reserved to people who lie in situations in which they can't get away with it.
• A lorry (for Americans: a truck) is probably a car when a sign says "no cars allowed beyond this point". If the sign says "only cars allowed beyond this point", it depends on the context. If it's the start of a motorway, lorries will be excluded; if it's a tiny private access road, the point of the sign is probably to forbid lorries as opposed to cars (while cyclists and pedestrians are still OK).
• A helicopter is an aircraft but not a plane. Here we are lucky to have two very clear terms for the larger category, one including helicopters and one not. Some other languages such as German are not so lucky. (German Flugzeug translates literally as aircraft, but since there is no separate German word for aeroplane, it can also be used to contrast with Helikopter.)
• "All free men are created equal", but does this include women? Apparently the people who put this into the Declaration of Independence didn't even think of them in this context. The hypocrisy of restricting this statement to free men bothered them enough to remove the word free before the final version, but not enough to include the anti-slavery passage or free their slaves. So it's not clear at all whether men in "All men are created equal" includes women and/or male slaves, let alone female slaves. Or children, for that matter.
• Torture is not torture when it is called enhanced interrogation and committed in the name of a country which can never be wrong.
• There are three kinds of sound: sound, ultrasound and infrasound.
• There are even more kinds of light. Besides light, infrared and ultraviolet there are also frequencies far away from the visible spectrum. Gamma-rays and X-rays, for example, while technically ultraviolet, would not normally be referred to as such. So light can refer to just visible light, to electromagnetic radiation close to the visible spectrum, or to all electromagnetic radiation.
• Sometimes it gets totally weird. State and country are usually synonyms, but in some cases only one word is usually applied to a large, sovereign entity, and the other to its smaller, non-sovereign constituents. E.g. the US is a country consisting of states and the UK is a state consisting of countries.
• Another weirdness: There are doctors (i.e. medical practitioners) who are not doctors (i.e. holders of a doctorate degree), and conversely there are doctors (i.e. holders of a doctorate degree) who are not doctors (i.e. medical practitioners). This is special in that there isn't even a proper general term for the two kinds of doctors.

A general solution for dealing with this kind of problem could use the technique shown in the following example:

Animal

• [ ] Human
• [ ] Other intelligent animal capable of speech
• [ ] Other animal.

Answer 13

Life form. Includes goblins and plants, excludes undead, golems, elementals, robots, demons.

Answer 14

Here is something else that I found on the Internet that I think can help you to find the right word to use for your game:

This is taken from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/human+being

human being - any living or extinct member of the family Hominidae characterized by superior intelligence, articulate speech, and erect carriage

human, homo, man

lumbus, loin - either side of the backbone between the hipbone and the ribs in humans as well as quadrupeds

human beings, human race, humankind, humans, mankind, humanity, world, man - all of the living human inhabitants of the earth;

Homo erectus - extinct species of primitive hominid with upright stature but small brain; "Homo erectus was formerly called Pithecanthropus erectus"

Homo soloensis - extinct primitive hominid of late Pleistocene; Java; formerly Javanthropus

Homo habilis - extinct species of upright East African hominid having some advanced humanlike characteristics

Homo sapiens - the only surviving hominid; species to which modern man belongs; bipedal primate having language and ability to make and use complex tools; brain volume at least 1400 cc

Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, Neandertal, Neandertal man, Neanderthal, Neanderthal man - extinct robust human of Middle Paleolithic in Europe and western Asia

body, organic structure, physical structure - the entire structure of an organism

chassis, bod, human body, material body, physical body, physique, build, anatomy, figure, flesh, frame, shape, soma, form - alternative names for the body of a human being;

human being human, man, woman, person, mortal,

A member of the human race: being, body, creature, homo, human, individual, life, man, mortal, party, person, personage, soul.

quad·ru·ped:
A four-footed animal. An animal, esp a mammal, that has all four limbs specialized for walking,having four feet

tetrapod - a vertebrate animal having four feet or legs or leglike appendages

an·i·mal
1. Any of numerous multicellular eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Metazoa (or Animalia) that ingest food rather than manufacturing it themselves and are usually able to move about during at least part of their life cycle. Sponges, jellyfishes, flatworms, mollusks, arthropods, and vertebrates are animals.

2. An animal organism other than a human, especially a mammal.

3. A person who behaves in a bestial or brutish manner.

4. A human considered with respect to his or her physical nature, as opposed to rational or spiritual nature.

5. A person having a specified aptitude or set of interests: "that rarest of musical animals, an instrumentalist ......"

adj.

1. Relating to, characteristic of, or derived from an animal or animals, especially when not human: animal cells; animal welfare.

2. Relating to the physical as distinct from the rational or spiritual nature of people: animal instincts and desires.

animal 1. (Zoology) zoology any living organism characterized by voluntary movement, the possession of cells with noncellulose cell walls and specialized sense organs enabling rapid response to stimuli, and the ingestion of complex organic substances such as plants and other animals. 2. any mammal, esp any mammal except man 3. a brutish person

an•i•mal

1. any member of the kingdom Animalia, comprising multicellular organisms that have a well-defined shape and usu. limited growth, can move voluntarily, actively acquire food and digest it internally, and have sensory and nervous systems that allow them to respond rapidly to stimuli.

2. any such living thing other than a human being.

3. a mammal, as opposed to a fish, bird, etc.

4. the physical or carnal nature of human beings; animality.

5. an inhuman person; brutish or beastlike person.

an·i·mal (ăn′ə-məl)

Any of a wide variety of multicellular organisms, most of which have a digestive tract, a nervous system, the ability to move voluntarily, and specialized sensory organs for recognizing and responding to their environment. Animals cannot manufacture their own food and must feed on plants, other animals, or other organic matter. Animals are grouped as a separate kingdom in taxonomy.

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I guess describing your game figures as:

"multicellular organisms which have a digestive tract and nervous system and who tend to move around while very often feeding on meat and having the ability to make noise"

...is a very correct describtion for both humans and animals but to describe figures in a game, it sounds rather long and complicated - lol :)

Answer 15

Creatures that are alive - move - breath- feed themselves and procreate plus digest and have multiple cells - plus multiple legs.

That includes animals and humans - excludes plants, virusses, bacteria, funghi.

It also excludes, the monsters, ghosts, zombies, undead, spirits ect.

How about this:

Category 1 - the animal and human combination

Alive, breathing and consisting of flesh, bone and water for humans and animals, do bleed when injured, ability to feel and "remember" or learn from experience

Category 2 Phantasy figures:

Goblins, elfs, witches, gnoms, pac men, kobalds, snow white, dwarfs, Rumpelstilzchen, speaking animals

Category 3 SF figures:

Alien, Predator, Terminator, Marsians, little green men, area 51 subjects

Category 4 Scary monsters:

Frankenstein, Godzilla, Chucky, Terminator

Category 5 the undead:

Ghosts, zombies, spirits, poltergeists, werwolfs, vampires

Category 6 Superheros: Superman, Electra, the Green Lantern, Mutant X, the Avengers,