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-vores vs. -phages Login/Join
 
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Picture of shufitz
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A recent bluffing-game word was merdivorous-dung-eating. When Kalleh mentioned it to me I thought of other eating-words that use the same -vorous suffix: carnivorous, herbiborous and omnivorous are all reasonably familiar.

But other like words, also meaning "_____-eating", instead use the suffix -phagous. They aren't common, but here is a list. Bacteria that eat oil (useful for dealing with an oil spill) are called _____phages -- I can't remember the prefix. Just last week "ophiophagous: Feeding on snakes" was bartleby.com's word of the day (which is the only reason I know of it). And there's even a -phagous word, coprophagous, that means exactly the same thing as our bluffing-game word merdivorous.

So query: why does English use a -vorous word in some cases and a -phagous word in others? Is there any pattern or historical reason?
 
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Picture of Kalleh
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And of course in medicine, there is the esophagus using the "phagous" root. Also, there is 'sarcophagus,' which has an interesting word history

BTW, I should have gotten "merdivorous" right. After I saw what others had chosen, I remembered the definition. Roll Eyes
 
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Picture of aput
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-vor- is Latin, -phag- is Greek. Ideally they should only be attached to their respective languages. There should also be quite a few doublets: carnivorous = sarcophagous, omnivorous = pantophagous, insectivorous = entomophagous, etc. I can't say I've actually heard of any of those Greek forms used in English, but there's no reason they shouldn't be.
 
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