Words derived from monsters,animals and creatures

• halcyon : Calm and prosperous (to describe a period) – from the bird in Greek fable that was supposed to have had the power to calm the wind and the waves while it nested on the sea during the winter solstice.
• harpy : A predatory person, a shrewish woman – from the Greek mythological monsters that were predatory birds with the heads of a women
• phoenix : A bird in Egyptian mythology that lived in the desert for 500 years and then consumed itself by fire, later to rise renewed from its ashes. The word is used to mean a person or thing of surpassing beauty or quality
• chimerical : in Greek mythology the Chimera is a monster made up of grotesquely disparate parts. The word ‘chimerical’ is used to mean created by, or as if by, a wildly fanciful imagination; highly improbable.
• cyclopean : Very big; huge; relating to or suggestive of a Cyclops – the single-eyed giant in the Greek epic ‘The Odyssey’.
• caught between Syclla and Charybdis : The hero Odysseus spent nine years returning home after the Trojan War. Along his voyage by sea, he came upon Scylla and Charybdis. Scylla was an enormous sea monster with numerous hands and six dog heads sprouting from her body; she ate men alive. Charybdis was a tremendous whirlpool that digested ships whole. Since the only way to get home was to choose either route, Odysseus had to decide on one horror or the other. He chose Scylla, losing six crewmen to Scylla's hunger
• furies : The Furies were the "avengers", so to speak, of crimes. They would pursue anyone with bloodstained hands; they are particularly cruel to Orestes after the murder of Clytemnestra, his mother. Some scholars believe the Furies represent one's own tormented conscious
• archnae : meaning "spider" in Greek. After the weaver girl who was turned into a spider by Athene. Hence the term "arachnid' used to describe a spider