indri
Americannoun
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indris
plural
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of indri
First recorded in 1830–40; from French indri, Malagasy indry “look!,” wrongly taken as animal's name
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Elizabeth St. Clair, a biological anthropologist at Johns Hopkins University who studies the evolution of the primate vocal tract, says she was surprised by the rhythmic similarities between indri and human songs.
From Scientific American ● Oct. 25, 2021
Scientists now say they have discovered one of the hallmarks of the skill in the fluffy, black-and-white indri lemur, a species distantly related to humans and only found in Madagascar.
From Science Magazine ● Oct. 25, 2021
“When you hear an indri song, they sound hauntingly beautiful,” says Andrea Ravignani, a bio-musicologist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
From Scientific American ● Oct. 25, 2021
You’ll also meet mouse lemurs, the smallest variety; indri, the largest; ring-tailed, popular in zoos; and sifakas, which appear to be gamboling to Mark Mothersbaugh’s soundtrack like Madagascar’s dance-floor kings.
From New York Times ● Apr. 10, 2014
It's hard to say how long the indri itself will stay with us.
From Time Magazine Archive
Whether this musical overlap between humans and indris is a case of common ancestry or convergent evolution — where our rhythmic abilities evolved independently — remains unclear.
From New York Times ● Oct. 25, 2021
From recordings of 346 lemur duets and choruses, Ravignani extracted 636 individual sounds uttered by the 39 adult indris, 20 females and 19 males.
From Science Magazine ● Oct. 25, 2021
Dissecting indri songs indicates these animals share an underlying sense of rhythm with humans, but it raises more questions about how indris communicate.
From Scientific American ● Oct. 25, 2021
Exploring our commonalities with indris is helping to demystify the evolutionary origins of human music, but it is also bringing much-needed attention to these lemurs who are of incredible cultural importance to the Malagasy people.
From New York Times ● Oct. 25, 2021
Their findings applied to all the indris they recorded; females and males sing at different tempos, but both employ the same rhythmic patterns.
From Scientific American ● Oct. 25, 2021
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
