English

Noun

reptilehood ‎(uncountable)

1. The state or essence of being a reptile.
   • 1859, Charles Wadsworth, The Joy in Harvest: A Thanksgiving Sermon, page 8:

     And so, though you, or Dr. Bellows, or an Archangel, should convince a Christian that the theatre, or the card-table, or a fancy ball, or a racecourse, were quite proper as religious amusements, still you must, moreover, unregenerate the man's taste, enveloping his spiritual wings back again into reptilehood, ere you can persuade him to rejoice in them.

   • 1986, Jeffery Boswall, Birds for All Seasons, page 14:

     At some point in the long evolutionary voyage from reptilehood, it developed a double voice-box, the syrinx...

   • 2005, Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, page 250:

     If, say, you think that a whole lot of related lineages were all independently evolving in parallel from amphibianhood through reptilehood towards mammalhood, you could speak of passing through the reptile grade on the way to the mammal grade.

Synonyms

• reptiledom