Word.ws English Dictionary

great apes

great apes is the plural of great ape.

Meaning of great ape

Noun

great ape (plural great apes)

  1. (archaic) A large non-human primate, such as a gorilla, an orangutan, or a chimpanzee.
  2. Any member of the taxonomic family Hominidae, including gorilla, orangutan, chimpanzee, excluding Homo.
    • Long before people thought in terms of evolution […] great apes were often confused with humans.2005, Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale, page 114
  3. Any member of the taxonomic family Hominidae, including Homo, and also many similar extinct species.
    • This wrinkled layer of gray matter that's highly developed in humans and other great apes, as well as whales, dolphins, and elephants, helps coordinate complex cognitive processes.2014, Laurel Braitman, Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves
    Synonyms:
    hominid

Questions about great apes

What is great apes the plural of?
Great apes is the plural of great ape.

Words near great apes in the dictionary

  1. Great and Little Kimble cum Marsh
  2. Great and Little Leighs
  3. great antshrike
  4. great antshrikes
  5. great ape
  6. great apes
  7. Great Apostasy
  8. great arteries
  9. great artery
  10. Great Artesian Basin
  11. Great Assassin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: great apes (page history and authors); great ape (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: “great apes.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/great_apes. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.