genus Gorilla
- noun
- /ˈdʒɛnəs ɡəˈrɪlə/
- Specialized
:
género Gorilla
- The genus Gorilla includes both the western and eastern species.
Examples
-
Scientists have classified all living gorillas under the genus Gorilla.
-
The genus Gorilla includes two species.
-
Research on the genus Gorilla has provided insights into evolutionary biology.
-
Many researchers study the genus Gorilla for conservation efforts.
-
Scientists have classified all living gorillas under the genus Gorilla.
-
Research on the genus Gorilla has provided insights into evolutionary biology.
-
The genus Gorilla includes both the western and eastern species.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase is a straightforward composition of 'genus' (a biological rank grouping related species) and 'gorilla' (the animal), so a learner who knows both words will understand it denotes the taxonomic group containing gorillas. This is a non-idiomatic, cross-linguistically common rank+taxon construction, making the meaning directly predictable from the constituents.
Etymology
Genus Gorilla comes from an old sea travel story that used a word for a group of 'hairy people', and in the 1800s explorers and scientists used that word for the big apes they found. So genus means the scientific group and Gorilla is the animal, and genus Gorilla is the group that contains all gorilla species.
