thagomizer (English)

Where does "thagomizer" come from?

The term 'thagomizer' was humorously coined by cartoonist Gary Larson in a 1982 'The Far Side' comic strip. In the cartoon, a caveman lectures on dinosaur anatomy and names the spiked tail end after a fictional character named 'Thag Simmons.' Although purely a modern invention, the word has since been enthusiastically adopted by paleontologists as the official anatomical term for this stegosaur feature.

Full etymology tree

• thagomizer (English), 'An arrangement of spikes found on the tails of various stegosaurs.'
  • derived Thag Simmons (English)
  • suffix -ize (English), 'Used to form verbs from nouns or adjectives, especially similative verbs'
  • suffix -er (English), 'A person or thing that does an action indicated by the root verb; used to form an agent noun.'

Updated July 2026

Etymology data from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0 · About Miraris