Dictionary

apery en · NOUN

Etymology

From ape + -ery.

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) A place where apes are kept.
   • If you have a hippopotamus major in your brain, you are no ape, though you had four hands, no feet, and were more apish than the apes of all aperies. 1862 August – 1863 March, Charles Kingsley, chapter IV, in The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, London; Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Macmillan and Co., published 1863, →OCLC, page 156:
2. (countable, uncountable) The practice of aping (copying)
3. (countable, uncountable) apish behavior.
   • Every object, whether the growth of nature or the work of man, was neat and artificial. It pleased me far better, than if the houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a nobler taste: for this nobler taste would have been mere apery. 1817, S[amuel] T[aylor] Coleridge, “Satyrane’s Letters. Letter III.”, in Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, volume II, London: Rest Fenner, […], →OCLC, page 236:

Forms

Relateds

monkey business

Translations (6)

sv apkonst (practice of aping or an apish action) · fi apinointi (practice of aping or an apish action) · fi jäljittely (practice of aping or an apish action) · fi matkiminen (practice of aping or an apish action) · pt macaquice (practice of aping or an apish action) · fi apinatarha (place where apes are kept)