Chimera
Etymology
From the Chimera of Greek myth, a fire-breathing monster with the parts of a lion, goat, and serpent, slain by the hero Bellerophon in Homer’s "Iliad." Because such a creature could not really exist, "chimera" came to mean a groundless fancy; because it was a fusion of parts, modern biology adopted it for an organism containing two distinct sets of DNA. The same beast underwrites both a fantasy and a genetics term.
noun · /ky-MEER-uh/
A wild fancy or impossible hope — or, in biology, a single organism made of genetically distinct cells.
What it names
A double-duty word: an illusory dream in ordinary speech, and a precise technical term for mixed-genome organisms.
Example
A fully self-sufficient national economy is a chimera in a globalized world.
Related idea
The adjective chimerical means fanciful or unreal; the noun chimera can also name a concrete biological fusion — one is purely figurative, the other a technical fact.
See also