A faun is a god from old Roman stories. From the waist up he looks like a man; below that he has a goat's legs, and often a goat's horns and ears too. Storytellers put fauns in the woods, looking after animals, playing pipes, and sometimes chasing people in a wild, playful way. Though actually, the Romans also had one chief god named Faunus — a kind of lord of this woodland crowd — and later writers mixed fauns up with the Greek goat-men called satyrs, who look much the same. In English today you mostly meet faun in books, paintings, and films, not in talk about real animals. It is a story-and-art word.