Word.ws English Dictionary

quadrumanous

quadrumanous adjective: having four feet whose first digits are opposable; applies to all non-human primates.

Adjective

quadrumanous (comparative more quadrumanous, superlative most quadrumanous)

  1. Having four feet whose first digits are opposable; applies to all non-human primates.
    • I've seen one monkey force open the jaws of his brother, resolutely introduce his fingers, pluck from the sanctuary of his cheek the filbert he had just stowed there for his private nutrition and delight, and crunch and eat it with a stern ecstasy of selfishness, himself; and I fancy that the...1863, Sheridan Le Fanu, The House by the Churchyard
    • The only quadrumanous animal in the group is the curious baboon-monkey, Cynopithecus nigrescens, already described as being one of the characteristic animals of Celebes.1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume II, London: Macmillan and Co., page 139

Forms of quadrumanous

comparativemore quadrumanous
superlativemost quadrumanous

Origin of quadrumanous

From Latin quattuor (“four”) + manus (“hand”), or alternatively from translingual Quadrumana + -ous.

Questions about quadrumanous

What does quadrumanous mean?
Quadrumanous means having four feet whose first digits are opposable; applies to all non-human primates.
What part of speech is quadrumanous?
Quadrumanous is an adjective.

Words near quadrumanous in the dictionary

  1. quadruman
  2. quadrumanal
  3. quadrumanals
  4. quadrumane
  5. quadrumanes
  6. quadrumanous
  7. quadrumans
  8. quadrumanual
  9. quadrumanuals
  10. quadrumvir
  11. quadrumvirate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: quadrumanous (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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