ape-man

ape-man — noun

1. an early creature, now extinct, whose body and brain looked partly like a modern

1.nounC1
Definition

an early creature, now extinct, whose body and brain looked partly like a modern human and partly like a chimpanzee or gorilla — for example, an australopithecine — sometimes pictured in old stories as the missing link between apes and people.

Example

The museum in Nairobi shows the skull of an ape-man who walked the African plains millions of years ago.

singular countable: an ape-man

Dr. Zara's class compared the jaw of a modern child with that of an ape-man.

comparison context: with a modern X

Common collocations
  • fossil ape-man
  • ape-man skull
  • prehistoric ape-man
Synonyms
  • hominid

    scientific; covers all great apes plus their human-like ancestors

  • australopithecine

    technical; one specific group of early ape-men

  • missing link

    popular phrase; suggests a single bridge species, an idea now rejected

Grammar Patterns

a/an + ape-man

ape-men (plural)

Usage Note

Largely outdated in modern science; specialists now use names like 'australopithecine' or 'hominid'. 'Ape-man' survives in popular books, museums, and fiction. Plural is 'ape-men'.

Common Mistakes

A monkey is an ape-man.
An australopithecine is an example of an ape-man.
modern living monkeys are not ape-men; the term refers to extinct human ancestors.
Two ape-mans were found.
Two ape-men were found.
plural follows the irregular pattern of 'man → men'.

Word family

Synonym discussion

Sense: noun/1

All four words describe early creatures on the human side of the evolutionary tree, but they differ in tone and precision. 'Hominid' is the broad scientific umbrella, covering modern humans, our extinct ancestors, and the great apes — it is the term you will read in textbooks. 'Australopithecine' is much narrower: a specific group of small-brained, upright-walking ancestors that lived in Africa around 2 to 4 million years ago. 'Ape-man' is the everyday, slightly old-fashioned word for any of these ancestors and shows up most often in museums and adventure stories. 'Missing link' is a popular phrase, not a scientific one, and suggests one single bridge species — an idea biologists now reject. So a researcher would write 'a new australopithecine fossil', a teacher might say 'an ape-man skull', and only a film poster would shout 'the missing link!'.

ape-man ↗hominid ↗australopithecine ↗missing link ↗

Common collocations

Nouns

Phrases

  • the missing link
  • early human ancestor

Prepositions

  • between (apes and humans)

Etymology

Old EnglishModern English

Formed in English in the late 1800s by joining 'ape' and 'man', soon after Darwin's writings made the idea of human evolution widely known. Victorian writers and early popular science books used 'ape-man' to picture an in-between creature linking modern people with their primate cousins. The word peaked in the early twentieth century alongside fossil discoveries like Java Man and Peking Man, and later spread into adventure novels and films.