gibbon
- noun
- /ˈɡɪbən/
- At the zoo, visitors were amazed by the acrobatic moves of the playful gibbons.
Examples
-
Wild gibbons communicate with each other through loud calls that echo through the jungle.
-
So the white faced Gibbon currently exists in southern Vietnam and in Thailand.
-
We laughed at the gibbons, the chimps, and the orangutans.
Fiction book (1990) -
I had seen pictures of the giant pandas of Sichuan and the black gibbons of Hainan.
Fiction book (1991) -
Sounds of screeching gibbons, exotic birds, chattering insects, and various other wildlife echo from the jungle.
Fiction book (1990) -
At least five genera are accounted for: two types of macaque monkey, orangutan, langur monkey, gibbon, and Homo.
Academic text (1991) -
The gibbon swung effortlessly from tree to tree in the dense forest.
Synonyms
A primate without a tail, like a chimpanzee or gorilla
How Agile
Surface Forms
Etymology
The word gibbon comes from the French word gibbon, a name early European writers used for the long-armed apes of Asia and was probably borrowed from a local Asian name for the animal. So gibbon is simply the name that travelled into English for this small, tailless ape.