How to Use ape in a Sentence

ape

1 of 2 noun
  • Her boyfriend's some big ape she met at a party.
  • There’s a lot left of the ape in us.
    — Literary Hub, 17 Feb. 2026
  • Give those apes a real tea party!
    — Aj Willingham, AJC.com, 6 Feb. 2026
  • But the apes' strict diet may have led to the species' demise, researchers found.
    — Mithil Aggarwal, NBC News, 11 Jan. 2024
  • And then all the ape movies were on around Thanksgiving.
    — Susan Morrison, New Yorker, 30 Nov. 2025
  • One day, a shrewdness of apes encountered a stench of skunks.
    — J. C. Duffy, The New Yorker, 2 Sep. 2023
  • But when a clan of apes breaks the peace, things get unpleasant quickly.
    — PC Magazine, 7 Nov. 2025
  • It has been observed in at least 51 species from small lemurs up to bigger apes.
    — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 4 Oct. 2023
  • So staying switched on longer in childhood could allow our brains to grow more than ape brains.
    — Carl Zimmer, New York Times, 27 Apr. 2023
  • But why would anyone pay that much money for an image of a cartoon ape?
    — Samara Lynn, ABC News, 1 Jan. 2022
  • In the clip, the ape taps on the glass of its enclosure and points at the human baby.
    — Victoria Moorwood, The Courier-Journal, 24 May 2023
  • That disruption appears to have helped early apes lose their tails.
    — Christopher McFadden, Interesting Engineering, 29 Aug. 2025
  • The film, however, apes these themes only in the broadest of strokes.
    — Siddhant Adlakha, Vulture, 26 June 2026
  • While the skull looks more ape-like, the femur appears markedly human.
    — Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover Magazine, 23 Mar. 2021
  • Luther walks through the door, somehow alive again, and his body no longer has its ape-like muscle tone and statue.
    — Amy MacKelden, Harper's BAZAAR, 22 June 2022
  • The Gardners, who were childless, raised the young ape on their ranch in her early years.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 12 Oct. 2021
  • But portraying Black people as any type of monkey or ape has a dark past.
    — Kinsey Crowley, USA Today, 6 Feb. 2026
  • Until now, there was not much direct evidence celebrities were paid to tout the apes.
    — Elle Reeve, CNN, 7 Apr. 2023
  • The forearms suggest a stronger link to apes, even as early humans began to stand on two legs.
    — Maria Mocerino, Interesting Engineering, 17 Jan. 2026
  • The video included a clip of cartoon apes with the Obamas' faces.
    — Victoria Moorwood, Cincinnati Enquirer, 6 Feb. 2026
  • The Tapanuli orangutan, the rarest ape on the planet, also shows up.
    — Dyna Rochmyaningsih, The Christian Science Monitor, 14 May 2021
  • And compared with apes, human laughter has become faster and more complex.
    — ABC News, 25 June 2026
  • In these tales, the animals are sometimes more human-like and, other times, more ape-like.
    — Matt Blitz, Popular Mechanics, 14 Mar. 2023
  • As the animals sipped their juice, the computer displayed pairs of ape faces for three seconds at a time.
    — Carl Zimmer, New York Times, 18 Dec. 2023
  • The answer to that question may lie in the anatomy of modern apes and extinct human species’ wrists.
    — Jackie Flynn Mogensen, Scientific American, 20 May 2026
  • Unsurprisingly, Alegre made the case for why the apes are here to stay.
    — Byjeff John Roberts, Fortune Crypto, 13 July 2023
  • The researchers note that apes have long arms and short legs, whereas hominins have relatively long legs.
    — Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, Interesting Engineering, 2 Jan. 2026
  • The first apes evolved about 20 million years ago and are bigger than other early primates.
    — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 6 Sep. 2023
  • The team asked a human experimenter to peer at the ceiling while sitting near an infant or an ape.
    — Anna Rogers, Discover Magazine, 21 Apr. 2022
  • Her observations about apes also helped inform how Goodall raised her son.
    — Emily Krauser, PEOPLE, 1 Oct. 2025

ape

2 of 2 verb
  • She apes the speech and manners of the rich.
  • My point is not to persuade states to ape Israel’s strategic posture.
    — Cian O'Driscoll, Quartz, 2 Dec. 2019
  • Not every crook has a skilled mimic on call to ape the brushstrokes of Titian or Twombly.
    — Julie Belcove, Robb Report, 28 Aug. 2022
  • Amazon aped the Remarkable 2 and gave the glass a rougher surface.
    — Brandon Widder, The Verge, 15 Aug. 2023
  • There simply isn’t enough time to see what the other player does and make a conscious decision to ape it.
    — Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 19 July 2011
  • Hopefully, that will honor the original film by not trying to ape it.
    — Anne Thompson, IndieWire, 11 Feb. 2026
  • But it has long been suggested that many of Gagosian’s collectors simply ape his taste.
    — Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker, 24 July 2023
  • What’s more, other countries are already aping these techniques in their own struggles.
    — Mikael Krogerus, New Republic, 2 Nov. 2017
  • Dara,’ added a cascade of plums and pinks, its droop aping Lunia’s forlornness.
    — Lindsey Taylor, WSJ, 21 Sep. 2017
  • But though there have been many iterations of Kong, none can ape the impact of the original.
    — Maureen Lee Lenker, EW.com, 26 Mar. 2021
  • Critics accused him of aping Farage’s rhetoric and warned that Labour could lose votes to the left in trying to court the right.
    — Christian Edwards, CNN Money, 30 Sep. 2025
  • The crowd attempted to ape his falsetto on the former but failed hilariously.
    — Eve Barlow, Billboard, 23 July 2017
  • The question now is just how many copycat shows will spring up at other networks, in an attempt to ape the Roseanne revival’s success.
    — Yohana Desta, HWD, 30 Mar. 2018
  • Season 2 tried to ape the confusing timeline trickery of the first and mostly failed miserably.
    — Erik Kain, Forbes, 10 Nov. 2021
  • Spikes of creamy white astilbe mimicked Mona Lisa’s skin tone, and the long seed heads of the andromeda aped her fingers and added a tawny layer.
    — Lindsey Taylor, WSJ, 7 Aug. 2018
  • Lumberjacks and the hipster bartenders who ape their style have long favored Pendleton’s flannel overshirts.
    — Jacob Gallagher, WSJ, 21 June 2018
  • Rose and Morris wound up using six different angles, with one that aped the back cover photo from the album as a mirror image.
    — Gary Graff, Billboard, 1 Mar. 2018
  • That being the case, stop aping the behavior of celebrities and find your own personal owners manual within.
    — Kimberly Garrison, Philly.com, 18 July 2017
  • More mainstream politicians on the center-right are aping Le Pen’s brand of identity politics.
    — Ishaan Tharoor, Washington Post, 23 Feb. 2018
  • There are high columns crawling with ivy, nearly 12 acres of rolling lawns, teensy windows with teensy shutters, and a diminutive pool house that apes a fairy-tale cottage.
    — Adriane Quinlan, Curbed, 16 Sep. 2025
  • Ostpunk was crude and derivative, but the Ostpunks were doing more than aping Western poses.
    — Dominic Green, WSJ, 20 Sep. 2018
  • The Gringa goes out of its way to ape the sort of archival work that fiction writers who deal carefully with history engage in—only to dismiss it all as meaningless.
    — Andrew Altschul, The New York Review of Books, 6 July 2020
  • People missing the mutation started figuring out ways to ape it very early on with primitive versions of Sun-In.
    — Amy Larocca, The Cut, 10 Aug. 2017
  • Theo James will ape the example of many a thespian predecessor by starring in a movie adaptation of a Stephen King tale.
    — Clark Collis, EW.com, 9 May 2023
  • Nicholson's fireworks would be subsequently aped, and amped up to over-the-top proportions, by other actors and by the future Batman villain himself.
    — Devan Coggan, Entertainment Weekly, 15 Mar. 2026
  • Others, like Shetler, come to ape the lives of local sadhus—followers of the formidable, three-eyed god, Shiva—squatting in stone caves and tree hollows.
    — Ariel Sophia Bardi, Slate Magazine, 2 Jan. 2017
  • There are the styling cues such as the hoops on the hood and covers over the tire inflation valves that ape the look of the real military Hummer but are absolutely pointless on the H2.
    — Andrew Moseman, Popular Mechanics, 1 Mar. 2017
  • What is more, some analysts argue, for all Mr Trong’s aping of Mr Xi, the two parties are drifting apart philosophically.
    — The Economist, 19 Dec. 2017
  • Initially, this dearth of new ideas isn’t so egregious; plenty of stories have aped Blade Runner for slick, sci-fi thrills and still managed to be insightful or at least entertaining.
    — Andrew Webster, The Verge, 24 May 2018
  • Critics and fanboy media thrashed Supergirl not just for its Guardians of the Galaxy touchstones, but also for aping Mad Max.
    — Anthony D'alessandro, Deadline, 29 June 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'ape.' 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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