Word.ws English Dictionary

hominin

hominin noun: any member of the taxonomic tribe Hominini, the evolutionary group that includes modern humans and now-extinct bipedal relatives.

Noun

hominin (plural hominins)

  1. Any member of the taxonomic tribe Hominini, the evolutionary group that includes modern humans and now-extinct bipedal relatives.
    • [...] prefer the third explanation for the advanced-looking features of Neandertals (Chapter 7) and the Ngandong hominins (Chapter 6), but they have had little to say about the post-Erectine archaics from China.2009, The Human Lineage, page 432
    • Caspari and Lee carried out comparisons ranging from ancient hominins such as australopithecines through to Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, assessing the ratios of young adults to old adults.2011, Chris Stringer, The Origin of Our Species, Penguin, published 2012, page 151

Examples of hominin in a sentence

  • This means that, in addition to democracy and gorillas, we must now credit Greece with being the cradle of the hominins - of which we humans are the only living representatives.2018, Tim Flannery, Europe: A Natural History, page 119:
  • Our bones are thinner, our muscles smaller, and our faces flatter than those of earlier hominins.2025 November 27, Tibi Puiu, “This Is Why Modern Human Faces Look So Different From Neanderthals”, in ZME Science, archived from the...

Forms of hominin

pluralhominins

Origin of hominin

From translingual Hominini, from the stem of Latin homo (“man”). Compare hominid.

Words formed from hominin

Questions about hominin

What does hominin mean?
Hominin means any member of the taxonomic tribe Hominini, the evolutionary group that includes modern humans and now-extinct bipedal relatives.
How do you use hominin in a sentence?
This means that, in addition to democracy and gorillas, we must now credit Greece with being the cradle of the hominins - of which we humans are the only living representatives.
What part of speech is hominin?
Hominin is a noun.
What is the plural of hominin?
The plural of hominin is hominins.

Words near hominin in the dictionary

  1. hominid
  2. hominids
  3. hominies
  4. hominiform
  5. hominiforms
  6. hominin
  7. hominine
  8. hominines
  9. hominins
  10. hominisation
  11. hominise

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hominin (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-hominin.wav.

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