Word.ws English Dictionary

soko

soko noun: a species of African ape, supposedly a variety of the chimpanzee.

Noun

soko (plural sokos)

  1. (dated) A species of African ape, supposedly a variety of the chimpanzee.
    • A soko alive was believed to be a good charm for rain; so one was caught, and the captor had the ends of two fingers and toes bitten off. The soko, or gorilla, always tries to bite off these parts, and has been known to overpower a young man and leave him without the ends of fingers and toes. […]...1875, Horace Waller, The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa
    • Old hunters and travellers say that they would rather steal the child of a native savage than to take one of the sokos.1918, Royal Dixon, The Human Side of Animals, page 232

Forms of soko

pluralsokos

Origin of soko

Perhaps from Swahili sokwe (“chimpanzee, non-human hominid”).

Questions about soko

What does soko mean?
Soko means a species of African ape, supposedly a variety of the chimpanzee.
What part of speech is soko?
Soko is a noun.
What is the plural of soko?
The plural of soko is sokos.

Words near soko in the dictionary

  1. Sokhum
  2. Sokhumi
  3. Sokil
  4. sokkie
  5. Sokna
  6. soko
  7. sokoban
  8. sokobans
  9. Sokodé
  10. Sokoke
  11. Sokokes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: soko (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: “soko.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/soko. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.