sloth bear
- noun
- /sloʊθ bɛr/
- Indian
:
oso perezoso
- Sloth bears have a distinctive shaggy coat that helps them blend into their forest habitat.
Examples
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The sloth bear forages for insects and fruits in the dense forests of India.
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"I'm a sloth bear," he said, and rolled over on the floor and pretended to sleep.
Fiction book (1992) -
I didn't know sloth bears worked.
-
The main quarries for most tourists are leopards, elephants (particularly tuskers), and a dark brown sloth bear (not the upside down variety).
Academic text (2006) -
While hiking in the jungles of Madhya Pradesh, we spotted a sloth bear searching for food.
Synonyms
A large shaggy bear with a white chest patch that eats insects like termites and ants
A large bear with a long snout and shaggy fur from south central Asia
Surface Forms
Morphology
This is a straightforward noun–noun compound where 'sloth' modifies 'bear', so a learner who knows both words will infer it denotes a kind of bear with sloth-like qualities (e.g., slow or resembling a sloth). Such taxonomic/compound naming is cross-linguistically common and follows regular composition patterns, making the basic meaning accessible to a B1 learner even if specific biological details are not predictable.
Etymology
The noun sloth bear may come from the animal's shaggy coat and slow walk, which made people think of a sloth. So the name joins sloth and bear and explains why this long-snouted, insect-eating animal is called a 'sloth bear' today.
