antennan.

Etymology: < classical Latin antenna, earlier antemna sailyard, yardarm, in post-classical Latin also sensory organ on the heads of insects and crustacea (15th cent.), of uncertain origin. In sense 4 after Italian antenna (Marconi, c1895), apparently so called on account of the pole to which the aerial wire was attached in Marconi's early experiments, although often associated semantically with sense 1a (on account of both appearance and function). Compare French antenne (1712 denoting a sensory organ on the heads of insects and crustacea; earlier denoting a sailyard, 13th cent. in Old French).The zoological use seems to have originated in the Latin translation of Aristotle's Historia animalium by Theodorus Gaza (died 1478), in which ancient Greek κεραῖαι ‘horns’ of insects (denoted by classical Latin cornua, cornicula in Pliny) is translated by Latin antennae (lit. sailyards). Since the projecting ‘horns’ of the long ascending yards of lateen sails, which were also called in Greek κεραῖαι, somewhat resemble the horns of insects (and were called in classical Latin cornua antennārum, lit. ‘horns of sailyards’ (Virgil)), the Latin word was presumably considered apt, and was adopted (often with an attribution to Aristotle) in Latin entomological works of the 16th and 17th centuries. Compare the following examples of Latin antennae in English context:1646 Sir T. Browne Pseudodoxia Epidemica iii. xviii. 153 Insects that have antennæ, or long hornes to feele out their way, as Butter-flies and Locusts.1657 S. Purchas Theatre Flying-insects i. iii. 4 The horns are called by Aristotle, Antennæ, because they hold them forth before them.