How to Use prehensile in a Sentence

prehensile

adjective
Definition of prehensilenext
  • The monkey has a prehensile tail.
  • The elephant has a prehensile trunk.
  • The partially prehensile proboscis helps the species probe the ground for leaves and fallen fruit.
    — Bradley J. Fikes, sandiegouniontribune.com, 3 July 2018
  • Her long, prehensile snout searched pockets and opened doors.
    — David Reamer, Anchorage Daily News, 7 Dec. 2020
  • Those of us without prehensile ears tend to think of our senses of hearing and touch as separate.
    — Elizabeth Preston, Discover Magazine, 3 May 2012
  • D’Manus is a 10 DoF, low-cost, reliable prehensile hand.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 21 Aug. 2022
  • The cuscus hangs on by its fingertips—or its curling, prehensile tail.
    — The Economist, 19 Apr. 2018
  • With its long prehensile tail, the alligator lizard can reach eleven inches.
    — Sharman Apt Russell, Discover Magazine, 21 July 2015
  • As their name suggests, brushtails have long, thick tails with a prehensile tip and a furless patch on the underside, both of which help them hang onto tree branches.
    — National Geographic, 6 Mar. 2020
  • Although Hollywood tends to focus on their teeth, grizzlies have prehensile lips that are perfect for stripping berries off branches, and their claws are ideal for digging up roots and turning over rocks to look for insects.
    — Brent Crane, Discover Magazine, 12 Mar. 2019
  • Correction: A previous version of this article state New World monkeys lack prehensile tails.
    — Sarah Gibbens, National Geographic, 25 Aug. 2017
  • So then the perfect shape would be that of the octopus or the giant squid, whose redundancy of limbs with great locomotor-prehensile-positional versatility would become an incentive to new operational talents, new methodologies and habits.
    — Ann Goldstein, Harper’s Magazine , 14 Dec. 2022
  • The form stuns with visceral color, prehensile line, and the most insinuative brushwork of any modern painter, all indirectly nourished by Guston’s passionate reverence for Renaissance masters.
    — Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 12 Oct. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'prehensile.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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