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:
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
“If an indri had some sort of metronome in its head going ‘tac, tac, tac,’ then they would likely produce what we see.
From New York Times ● 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
Finally, our guide's passing beam catches the shining eyes of an indri in the night, reflecting back at 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
It has been 77.5 million years since the common ancestor of humans and indris existed, a chasm of evolutionary time that makes it unlikely rhythm was an ancestral trait.
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
“It seems like it’s an individual characteristic of indris that are not seen in many other mammals or even birds,” says St. Clair, who was not involved in the new study.
From Scientific American ● Oct. 25, 2021
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