Cercopithecids

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Long-tailed monkeys native to Africa and Asia, forming the large family of Old World monkeys that includes baboons, macaques and guenons
2. A family of primates from Africa and Asia whose members, such as macaques, baboons and guenons, have narrow noses and non-prehensile tails
3. Tailed Old World monkeys belonging to the primate family Cercopithecidae, found across Africa and much of Asia, including baboons and macaques

Etymology: Cercopithecids are the monkeys of the family Cercopithecidae, the Old World monkeys of Africa and Asia, and this word is simply the plural of "cercopithecid". The singular is itself a scientific coinage built from Greek: "kerkos" meant "tail" and "pithekos" meant "ape", so the family name reads roughly as "tailed apes". The Greeks used the word "kerkopithekos" for a kind of long-tailed monkey, and the modern family takes its name from that classical stem. Modern taxonomists then turned the Greek stem into a family name by adding the standard Latin-style ending "-idae", which marks a family in zoological nomenclature. The singular "cercopithecid" is the English adjective-noun form made from that family name, so each word in the chain is a recognisable piece of the one before. The plural follows ordinary English practice, adding "-s" to give "cercopithecids".