(often initial capital letter) a mythological, fire-breathing monster, commonly represented with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail.
2.
any similarly grotesque monster having disparate parts, especially as depicted in decorative art.
3.
a horrible or unreal creature of the imagination; a vain or idle fancy:
He is far different from the chimera your fears have made of him.
4.
Genetics. an organism composed of two or more genetically distinct tissues, as an organism that is partly male and partly female, or an artificially produced individual having tissues of several species.
1350-1400;Middle Englishchimera < Latinchimaera < Greekchímaira she-goat; akin to Old Norsegymbr,Englishgimmer ewe-lamb one year (i.e., one winter) old, Latinhiems winter (see hiemal), Greekcheimṓn winter
fabulous monster, late 14c., from Old French chimere or directly from Medieval Latin chimera, from Latin Chimaera, from Greek khimaira, name of a mythical creature, slain by Bellerophon, with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail (supposedly personification of snow or winter); literally "year-old she-goat" (masc. khimaros), from kheima "winter season" (see hibernation). Figurative meaning "wild fantasy" first recorded 1580s in English (attested 13c. in French).
Beestis clepid chymeres, that han a part of ech beest, and suche ben not, no but oonly in opynyoun. [Wyclif, "Prologue"]
World-Wide Web A modular, X Window System-based World-Wide Webbrowser for Unix. Chimera uses the Athenawidget set so Motif is not needed. It supports forms, inline images, TERM, SOCKS, proxy servers, Gopher, FTP, HTTP and local file accesses. Chimera can be extended using external programs. New protocols can easily be added and alternate image formats can be used for inline images (e.g. PostScript). Version 1.60 is available for (ftp://ftp.cs.unlv.edu/pub/chimera). (http://unlv.edu/chimera/). Chimera runs on SunSPARCSunOS 4.1.x, IBMRS/6000AIX 3.2.5, Linux 1.1.x. It should run on anything with X11R[3-6], imake and a C compiler. (1994-11-08)
