metamorphosis [LME] Metamorphosis came into English via Latin from Greek metamorphoun ‘transform, change shape’. It was introduced from the Metamorphoses, a large collection of verse stories by Ovid (43 bc–ad 17 or 18), about transformations of gods and mortals into the shapes of objects, plants, or animals. In the 1980s morph, derived from metamorphosis, came to be used in computer animation for the merging of one image into another, although the idea was already familiar to young television viewers in the UK from the character of Morph, a stop-motion plasticine character created by Aardman Animations from 1977, who would mutate in the same way.