Other forms: baboons
A baboon is a large monkey with a long doglike face. A troop of baboons, the baboon's muzzle, baboons on the road.
They live in troops with complicated politics that primatologists have studied for decades, and the social knowledge each animal carries is the point of the research. The word is also an insult, which is unfair to a clever animal.
1nounbaboonA large monkey with a long doglike face.
“A baboon grabbed a sandwich from a tourist's hand and ran up a rock.”
baboon is an animal.
Old French babouin comes from baboue, a grimace or muzzle, of imitative origin.
Vulgar Latin
babouinus
Old French
babouin
Middle English
babewin
English, today
baboon
Built from
Middle English babewin, baboin, from Old French babouin, from baboue (“grimace; muzzle”) (whence French babouin), from an imitative origin. According to Oxford English Dictionary, it was an imitative base bab-, which is in turn from the (reduplicated) syllable ba, characteristic of early infantile vocalization (and expressive of the movement of the lips in speech). French babouin was also borrowed into other European languages. Confer Vulgar Latin babouinus, Vulgar Latin babuinare, Italian babbuino, babuino (“baboon”), Dutch baviaan (“baboon”), German Pavian* (“baboon”)
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA