Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A mature male gorilla having silvery white hair across the back.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The knot or Canute, a sandpiper. See cut under
Tringa .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Zoöl.) The knot.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun zoology A
mature male of the severalspecies ofgorilla , so named from the silverstreaking on its back. - noun informal, by extension A
dominant older human male.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun an adult male gorilla with grey hairs across the back
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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They live in families, each headed by an adult male called a silverback because of its distinctive coloring.
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There's nine gorillas in this group and every gorilla group is leaded by an adult male called a silverback, the silverback right over there, the distinctive coloring on his back.
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But the zoo's gorillas already are in three "families," each made up of one sexually mature male, called a silverback, and several females and their offspring.
dispatch.com: RSS Kathy Lynn Gray 2010
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But the term "silverback" is not only applied to gorillas.
Hullabaloo 2006
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"I base him off of a silverback or a lion," Momoa says.
Game of Thrones: Jason Momoa's Secrets to Playing a Naked, Eyeliner-Wearing Dothraki Warlord 2011
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When I see those TV commercials of silverback Baby Boomers sprinting with vintage surfboards toward ever-higher-yielding money-market funds, I feel both Boomer derision and a gnawing dread that my own funds are not similarly accruing (and in fact they are not — but maybe, to offset the losses, Brian Grazer will option my book?).
Class Dismissed 2009
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I want the gorilla, she says, pointing to the rafters at a pink gorilla the size of a Rwandan silverback.
Soul Trapper F. J. Lennon 2011
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I want the gorilla, she says, pointing to the rafters at a pink gorilla the size of a Rwandan silverback.
Soul Trapper F. J. Lennon 2011
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When I see those TV commercials of silverback Baby Boomers sprinting with vintage surfboards toward ever-higher-yielding money-market funds, I feel both Boomer derision and a gnawing dread that my own funds are not similarly accruing (and in fact they are not — but maybe, to offset the losses, Brian Grazer will option my book?).
Class Dismissed 2009
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"There's Lenny 'Apples' Appleton, 'Mad' Dickie Barrett and Micky 'Silver' Darrell, named because he looks like a silverback gorilla," chuckles Brian Holmes, a veteran who has carted fish for the merchants here in east London for 21 years.
How the fish market porters moved Ed Miliband in his search to rekindle Labour's flame 2011
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