A monkey is a primate with a long tail, flexible limbs, and a clever, playful nature, living mostly in trees in tropical regions. People often use the word informally to refer to many small, agile primates.
Origin uncertain; it may come from Middle Low German “Moneke,” the name of a monkey character in a 16th-century beast story. The playful literary name may have stuck as a general term.
The word monkey may trace back not to science but to a mischievous storybook character. It’s oddly fitting that an animal famous for play and trouble got its name from literature rather than biology.
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