I have just seen this post on facebook.
It says "This two-headed turtle was born on June 18th…" so I wondered if the word "born" can be used with animals that lay eggs. Is there another word for that?
Learn English – Can “born” be used with creatures that come from eggs
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Best Answer
I don’t have any particular reaction against using ‘born’ for animals like turtles. It describes at what time their lifespan began, roughly.
The specific term that relates to the ‘birth’ of coming out of an egg is hatching, but that does specifically describe the moment when the eggshell cracks and the young emerges from within the egg, rather than more generically the time when you start to count the animal’s age (even though it’s the same moment, of course).
If you are talking about an old turtle, for example, it sounds more natural to me to say that it was born in 1832 than to say that it hatched in 1832.