Cercopithecoid

Part of speech: noun, adjective

Definitions

1. Relating to or resembling the Old World monkeys, a large family of primates native to Africa and Asia with narrow noses and nonprehensile tails
2. Belonging to the superfamily of catarrhine monkeys found in Africa and Asia, distinguished by their downward-facing nostrils and grasping hands
3. Describing the group of tailed Old World primates that includes baboons, macaques, and guenons, all native to the eastern hemisphere

Etymology: Cercopithecoid is a scientific coinage, not an ancient word. It describes the Old World monkeys, the family Cercopithecidae, and it is built from Greek. The stem comes from "kerkos", meaning "tail", and "pithekos", meaning "ape", with the suffix "-oid" meaning "resembling" added at the end. Put together, the sense is "tail-ape-like", a reference to the tails that these monkeys have, which distinguish them from the tailless apes. The Greek root "pithekos" appears in other modern zoological terms, which is why the word reads as a set of familiar parts. The "-oid" ending is itself a Greek suffix that taxonomists attached to family-group and form names to mean "like" or "of the kind of". Here it marks the group as one resembling the family rather than being the family itself. Because the word was constructed by naturalists from classical building blocks, its ancient Greek sources never used it. Its meaning is fixed by the taxonomic classification it names, and it has stayed narrowly technical ever since.