Word.ws English Dictionary

blackback

blackback noun: an adolescent male gorilla or chimpanzee.

Noun

blackback (plural blackbacks)

  1. An adolescent male gorilla or chimpanzee.
    • The author worked with two main study groups of gorilla in that region. Each contained a fully mature male (silverback), who was the obvious leader of the group, and a younger male of around 9 years of age (blackback), who had not yet assumed full adult morphology.1979, A. H. Harcourt, “Contrasts between Male Relationships in Wild Gorilla Groups,”, in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, volume 5, number 1, page 40
    • The second-ranking silverback is also a possible sire in the sixth case, although three other lower-ranking blackback males were also not excluded.2005, B. J. Bradley et al., “Mountain Gorilla Tug-of-War,”, in PNAS, volume 102, number 26, page 9421
  2. (UK) The great black-backed gull.

Forms of blackback

pluralblackbacks

Origin of blackback

From black + back.

Questions about blackback

What does blackback mean?
Blackback means an adolescent male gorilla or chimpanzee.
What part of speech is blackback?
Blackback is a noun.
What is the plural of blackback?
The plural of blackback is blackbacks.

Words near blackback in the dictionary

  1. blackaroon
  2. blackaroons
  3. blackassed
  4. blackaviced
  5. blackavised
  6. blackback
  7. blackbacks
  8. blackbag
  9. blackbagged
  10. blackbagging
  11. blackbags

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: blackback (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “blackback.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/blackback. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.