Word.ws English Dictionary

monkey lips

monkey lips noun: an anatomical structure in the heads of certain cetaceans involved in the production of clicks and other sounds.

monkey lips: an anatomical structure in the heads of certain cetaceans involved in the production of clicks and...
Image: Philcha, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

monkey lips pl (normally plural, singular monkey lip)

  1. (plural, plural-normally) An anatomical structure in the heads of certain cetaceans involved in the production of clicks and other sounds.
    • Each monkey lips/dorsal bursae complex (MLDB) is associated with one (right and left) air passage. Each complex is composed of at least two fatty bursae that are embedded in the monkey lips along the airway, a cartilagenous “stiffening” rod, and a stout ligament.1990, T.W. Cranford, “Components of a hypothetical odontocete biosonar signal generator”, in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, →DOI, page S4
    • This finding is not only excluding a laryngeal sound source, but also demonstrating that the sound source for click generation in sperm whales is indeed the monkey lips.2003, Peter Madsen, D.A. Carder, Whitlow W.L. Au, P.E. Nachtigall, B. Møhl, Sam H. Ridgway, “Sound production in neonate sperm whales (L)”, in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, volume...
  2. (plural, plural-normally) Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see monkey, lip.

Forms of monkey lips

singularmonkey lip

Origin of monkey lips

Compare French museau de singe (literally “monkey’s snout”).

Questions about monkey lips

What does monkey lips mean?
Monkey lips means an anatomical structure in the heads of certain cetaceans involved in the production of clicks and other sounds.
What part of speech is monkey lips?
Monkey lips is a noun.

Words near monkey lips in the dictionary

  1. monkey jars
  2. Monkey King
  3. monkey ladder
  4. monkey ladders
  5. monkey lip
  6. monkey lips
  7. monkey man
  8. monkey meat
  9. monkey men
  10. monkey metal
  11. monkey mind

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: monkey lips (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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