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brown hyena

brown hyena noun: a comparatively rare species of hyena, Parahyaena brunnea, endemic to desert and semi-desert areas and open woodland savannahs of southern Africa.

brown hyena: a comparatively rare species of hyena, Parahyaena brunnea, endemic to desert and semi-desert areas...
Image: Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

brown hyena (plural brown hyenas)

  1. A comparatively rare species of hyena, Parahyaena brunnea, endemic to desert and semi-desert areas and open woodland savannahs of southern Africa.
    • It is now well established that brown hyenas, at least when rearing cubs, deliberately hunt other carnivores (up to the size of cheetahs, on the Kruger Park evidence) and take them to the breeding dens as food for the cubs.1981, C. K. Brain, The Hunters Or the Hunted?: An Introduction to African Cave Taphonomy, page 77
    • Because they are scavengers in a semiarid ecosystem where carrion is often limited, brown hyenas naturally occur in small numbers.1984, Mark Owens, Delia Owens, Cry of the Kalahari, page 324

Forms of brown hyena

pluralbrown hyenas

Questions about brown hyena

What does brown hyena mean?
Brown hyena means a comparatively rare species of hyena, Parahyaena brunnea, endemic to desert and semi-desert areas and open woodland savannahs of southern Africa.
What part of speech is brown hyena?
Brown hyena is a noun.
What is the plural of brown hyena?
The plural of brown hyena is brown hyenas.

Words near brown hyena in the dictionary

  1. brown hollands
  2. brown honeyeater
  3. brown honeyeaters
  4. Brown HT
  5. brown hydrogen
  6. brown hyena
  7. brown hyenas
  8. brown inca
  9. brown incas
  10. brown job
  11. brown jobs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: brown hyena (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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