Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
Definition: Cheetah |
CheetahNoun1. Long-legged spotted cat of Africa and southwestern Asia having nonretractile claws; the swiftest mammal; can be trained to run down game. Source: WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved. |
Date "cheetah" was first used in popular English literature: sometime before 1892. (references) |
(From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia)
Cheetah Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Class: Mammalia Order: Carnivora Family: Felidae Genus: Acinonyx Species: jubatus Binomial name Acinonyx jubatus The Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) is an atypical member of the cat family (Felidae) that hunts by sight and speed rather than by stealth. It is the fastest of all terestrial animals and can reach speeds of over 110 km/h in short bursts.
The cheetah's body is svelte and muscular, though it seems slender and almost fragile in build. Its chest is deep and its waist narrow. It has a small head and short muzzle, high-placed eyes, large nostrils, and small round ears. The fur of the cheetah is fauve yellow with round black spots and black tear lines on the sides of the muzzle. The adult animal weighs from 39 to 65 kg. Its total body length is from 112 to 135 cm, while the tail can measure up to 84 cm.
The genus name, Acinonyx, means "no-move-claw" in Greek, while the species name, jubatus, means "maned" in Latin, a reference to the mane found in Cheetah cubs. It is the only cat that cannot completely retract its claws. Even when retracted, the claws remain visible and are used for grip during the cheetah's acceleration and maneuvering.
The English word "cheetah" comes from Hindi chiitaa, which is perhaps derived from Sanskrit chitraka, meaning "the spotted one". Other major European languages use variants of the medieval Latin gattus pardus, meaning "cat-leopard": French guépard; Italian ghepardo; Spanish guepardo; and German Gepard.
Reproduction and social life
Females give birth to 3 to 5 cubs, after a gestation of 90 to 95 days. The cubs weigh from 150 to 300 g at birth. They leave their mother between 13 and 20 months after birth. The cheetah can live over 20 years. Unlike other felines, the adult females do not have true territories and seem to avoid each other. Males sometimes form small groups, especially when they came from the same litter.
Food
Cheetahs are carnivores, eating mostly mammals under 40 kg, including gazelles, impala, gnu calves, and hares. Prey is stalked to about ten meters' distance, then chased. A hunt is usually over in less than a minute and if the cheetah fails to make a quick catch, it will often give up rather than waste energy.
Habitat
Cheetahs are found in the wild only in Africa, but in the past their range extended into northern India and the Iranian plateau, where they were domesticated by aristocrats and used to hunt antelopes in much the same way as is still done with members of the greyhound family.A cheetah at the Wild Animal Park.
The cheetah prefers to live in an open biotope, such as semi-desert, prairie, and thick brush.
Cheetahs have unusually low genetic variability and high abnormal sperm count. It is thought that they went through a prolonged period of inbreeding following a genetic bottleneck during the last ice age. They probably evolved in Africa during the Miocene epoch (26 million to 7.5 million years ago), before migrating to Asia. Now extinct species include: Acinonyx pardinensis (Pliocene epoch), much larger than modern cheetahs and found in Europe, India, and China; Acinonyx intermedius (mid-Pleistocene period), found over the same range; and Miracinonyx inexpectatus, Miracinonyx studeri, and Miracinonyx trumani (early to late Pleistocene epoch), found in North America.
Economic importance for man
Cheetah fur was formerly regarded as a status symbol. Today, cheetahs have a growing economic importance for ecotourism and they are also found in zoos. Because cheetahs are far less aggressive than other big cats, cubs are sometimes sold as pets. This is an illegal trade, because international conventions forbid private ownership of wild animals or species threatened with extinction.
Cheetahs were formerly hunted because many farmers believed that they ate livestock. When the species came under threat, numerous campaigns were launched to try to educate farmers and encourage them to conserve Cheetahs.
Conservation status
Cheetah cubs have a high mortality rate due to genetic factors and predation by carnivores, in competition with the cheetah, such as the lion and hyena. Certain biologists now claim that they are too inbred to flourish as a species.
Cheetahs are included on the IUCN list: vulnerable species (African subspecies threatened, Asiatic subspecies in critical situation) as well as on the US ESA: threatened species - Appendix I of CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species).
Cheetahs in art and literature
- In Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne (1523) the god's chariot is borne by cheetahs (which were used as hunting-animals in Renaissance Italy).
- George Stubbs' "Cheetah with Two Indian Attendants and a Stag" (1764-1765) also shows the Cheetah as a hunting animal and commemorates the gift of a Cheetah to George III by the English Governor of Madras, Sir George Pigot:
- The Caress (1896), by the Belgian symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), is a representation of the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx and portrays a creature with a woman's head and a cheetah's body (often misidentified as a leopard's).
- Cheetahs sometimes turn up as exotic pets, and one is portrayed as such in a piece of art deco sculpture in "polished chrome and ebony", circa 1925, from the Wiener Werkstätte (the Vienna Workshops).
- André Mercier's Our Friend Yambo (1961) is curious French biography of a Cheetah adopted by a French couple and brought to live in Paris. It is seen as a French answer to Born Free (1960), whose author, Joy Adamson, produced a cheetah biography of her own, The Spotted Sphinx (1969).
- Clare Bell's Tomorrow's Sphynx (1986) is an unusual story from the point of view of a misfit cheetah living on an abandoned Earth far in the future. Young adult.
See also
- Extinction
References
- Great Cats, Majestic Creatures of the Wild, ed. John Seidensticker, illus. Frank Knight, (Rodale Press, 1991), ISBN 0878579656.
- Cheetah, Katherine (or Kathrine) & Karl Ammann, Arco Pub, (1985), ISBN 0668062592.
- Cheetah Conservation Trust
- Cheetah Factsheet
Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia under a copyleft GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) from the article "Cheetah."
Synonym: CheetahSynonym: chetah (n). (additional references) |
Crosswords: Cheetah |
| English words defined with "cheetah": Gueparde ♦ Hunting cat, Hunting leopard ♦ Youze. (references) |
| Domain | Usage | |
Screenplays | Presence like a cheetah rather than a chimp (The Basketball Diaries; writing credit: Bryan Goluboff) | |
Lyrics | From, Club Cheetah, to Club Amnesia (I Just Wanna Love U (Give it 2 Me); performing artist: Jay-Z) | |
Movie/TV Titles | Cheetah Girls (2003) | |
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | ||
| Domain | Title | ||
Books | |||
Theater & Movies | |||
Music |
| ||
High Tech |
| ||
Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
 |  |
| "Cheetah" by Sreekanth Devarajan Commentary: "Cheetah after Lunch!." | "Cheetah" by Michelle Kwajafa Commentary: "Cheetah at the zoo in washington dc." |
Source: photographs selected by the editor, with permission from the photographers. | |
| "Cheetah" is generally used as a noun (singular) -- approximately 98.68% of the time. "Cheetah" is used about 76 times out of a sample of 100 million words spoken or written in English. Its rank is based on over 700,000 words used in the English language. Some parts-of-speech are not covered due to the samples used by the British National Corpus. (note: percents less than one-hundredth of one percent have been omitted) |
| Parts of Speech | Percent | Usage per 100 Million Words | Rank in English |
| Noun (singular) | 98.68% | 75 | 38,535 |
| Noun (proper) | 1.32% | 1 | 339,140 |
| Total | 100.00% | 76 | N/A |
Source: compiled by the editor from several corpora; see credits.
| The following statistics estimate the number of searches per day across the major English-language search engines as identified by various trade publications. Hyperlinks lead to commercial use of the expression at Amazon.com. |
| Expression | Frequency per Day | Expression | Frequency per Day |
cheetah | 3,260 | cheetah cub | 30 |
cheetah chat | 390 | cheetah animal | 25 |
cheetah picture | 328 | cheetah diego san | 23 |
cheetah girl | 301 | king cheetah | 22 |
cheetah print | 206 | cheetah habitat | 21 |
club cheetah | 151 | atlanta cheetah club | 21 |
cook county cheetah | 139 | screamin cheetah wheelies | 21 |
cheetah boat | 102 | burner cd cheetah | 18 |
cheetah las vegas | 62 | cheetah car | 18 |
cheetah girl movie | 58 | cheetah girls.com | 17 |
cheetah atlanta | 57 | cheetah windsor | 17 |
cheetah information | 48 | cheetah info | 17 |
cheetah club strip | 47 | cheetah disney girl movie | 16 |
cheetah photo | 46 | cheetah sister | 16 |
cheetah pic | 39 | cheetah disney girl | 16 |
cheetah satellite | 37 | cheetah gym | 16 |
chester cheetah | 36 | endangered cheetah | 16 |
cheetah fact | 35 | seagate cheetah | 16 |
baby cheetah | 33 | cheetah satellite.com | 15 |
night club cheetah | 33 | channel cheetah disney girl | 15 |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. | |||
| Language | Translations for "cheetah"; alternative meanings/domain in parentheses. | |
Albanian | gatopard. (various references) | |
Arabic | الفهد الصياد, الشيتا نوع من قرود. (various references) | |
Bulgarian | вид леопард. (various references) | |
Czech | gepard. (various references) | |
Danish | chetah, jagtleopard, gepard. (various references) | |
Dutch | cheetah, jachtluipaard. (various references) | |
Finnish | gepardi. (various references) | |
French | guépard. (various references) | |
German | gepard (hunting-leopard). (various references) | |
Greek | κυναίλουροσ, γατόπαρδοσ, γατόπαρδος, είδοσ λεοπάρδαλησ (ounce), τσίτα. (various references) | |
Hebrew | ברדלס (panther), צ'יטה. (various references) | |
Hungarian | gepárd. (various references) | |
Italian | ghepardo. (various references) | |
Manx | lepard shelg. (various references) | |
Pig Latin | eetahchay.(various references) | |
Portuguese | chita (calico, printed cotton), leopardo (leopard, panther). (various references) | |
Russian | гепард (cheeta). (various references) | |
Shona | dindingwe. (various references) | |
Spanish | leopardo cazador. (various references) | |
Swedish | gepard. (various references) | |
Turkish | leopar benzeri bir yabani kedi, çita (hunting cat, hunting leopard). (various references) | |
Ukrainian | гепард. (various references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various translation references. | ||
| Language | Period | Translations |
| Sumerian | 3100 BCE-2500 BCE | nib. (various references) |
| Latin | 500 BCE-Modern | Acinonyx jubatus. (various references) |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references. | ||
Derivations | |
Words beginning with "cheetah": cheetahs. (additional references) | |
| |
"Cheetah" is suggested in spellcheckers for the following: chaetae, cheata, Cheema, Cheeta, Cheetas, cheetta, chefette, Cheltam, cheltenh, chemtech, cheta, Chetan, Chetta, cheyette, Chipeta, Chiweta, Chiyah, cleithan, keeyah. (additional references) | |
| Source: compiled by the editor, based on several corpora (additional references). | |
| # of Phoneme Matches | Pronunciation | Word(s) rhyming with "cheetah" (pronounced khē"tu) |
| 3 | -ē" t u | Bonita, fajita, Margarita, Meta, Pita. |
Source: compiled by the editor (additional references); see credits. | ||
Scrabble® Enable2K-Verified Anagrams | |
| Words within the letters "a-c-e-e-h-h-t" | |
-1 letter: chetah, thecae. | |
-2 letters: cheat, cheth, hatch, heath, tache, teach, theca. | |
-3 letters: ache, cate, cete, chat, each, eath, eche, etch, haet, hate, hath, heat, heth, tace, tach, thae, thee. | |
-4 letters: ace, act, ate, cat, cee, eat, eta, eth, hae, hah, hat, heh, het, tae, tea, tee, the. | |
-5 letters: ae, ah, at, eh, et, ha, he, ta. | |
| Words containing the letters "a-c-e-e-h-h-t" | |
+1 letter: cheetahs. | |
+2 letters: hatcheled, heartache. | |
+3 letters: hatchelled, hatcheries, heartaches, thearchies. | |
+4 letters: chamaephyte, headachiest, heptarchies, hypothecate, thickheaded. | |
+5 letters: chamaephytes, chemotherapy, deathwatches, hectographed, hemichordate, hypothecated, hypothecates, tracheophyte. | |
| Source: compiled by the editor from various references; see credits. SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the U.S.A and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and throughout the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Mattel and Spear are not affiliated with Hasbro. | |
| 1. Definition 2. Synonyms 3. Crosswords 4. Usage: Modern | 5. Usage: Commercial 6. Images: Slideshow 7. Images: Digital Art 8. Usage Frequency | 9. Expressions: Internet 10. Translations: Modern 11. Translations: Ancient 12. Derivations | 13. Rhymes 14. Anagrams 15. Bibliography |
Copyright © Philip M. Parker, INSEAD. Terms of Use.
