Word.ws English Dictionary

caniform

caniform adjective: characteristic of, or relating to the Caniformia.

caniform: characteristic of, or relating to the Caniformia
Image: Altaileopard, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Adjective

caniform (not comparable)

  1. Characteristic of, or relating to the Caniformia.

Noun

caniform (plural caniforms)

  1. Any carnivore of the suborder Caniformia, which are regarded as dog-like.
    • Modern carnivores appeared as well, diverging into the feliforms (cats, hyaenas, and mongooses) and caniforms (dogs, bears, raccoons, weasels, and seals).1997, Peter D. Ward, The Call of Distant Mammoths: Why the Ice Age Mammals Disappeared, page 73
    • It is representative of a group of early carnivores, the miacids, that were the ancestors of modern caniforms: the canids (that is, the dogs, coyotes, wolves, foxes, and jackals) and a large group made up of the bear, raccoon, and weasel families.2011, John P. Rafferty, editor, The Cenozoic Era: Age of Mammals, page 93

Forms of caniform

pluralcaniforms

Origin of caniform

From Latin canis (“dog”) + -form.

Questions about caniform

What does caniform mean?
Caniform means characteristic of, or relating to the Caniformia.
What part of speech is caniform?
Caniform can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near caniform in the dictionary

  1. canicule
  2. canid
  3. canidate
  4. canidates
  5. canids
  6. caniform
  7. caniforms
  8. Caniglia
  9. Caniglias
  10. Canigou
  11. canigre

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: caniform (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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