The Collaborative International Dictionary
Brachiate \Brach"i*ate\, a. [L. brachiatus (bracch-) with boughs or branches like arms, from brackium (bracch-) arm.] (Bot.) Having branches in pairs, decussated, all nearly horizontal, and each pair at right angles with the next, as in the maple and lilac.
Wiktionary
Etymology 1
-
Having decussate branches. Etymology 2
v
(context intransitive English) To move like a brachiator; to swing from branch to branch, advance by brachiation.
WordNet
adj. having widely spreading paired branches; "maples are brachiate"
having arms or armlike appendages
v. swing from one hold to the next; "the monkeys brachiate"
Usage examples of "brachiate".
My brother had enjoyed the rainforests of Huthu very much, but though he could brachiate he could barely read, and we were all bright blue with skin-fungus.
Rosa had actually brachiated, with her left arm holding onto long, ver- tical, reddish fibers that looked like vines dropping from the dark roof.
He brachiated up into his chair effortlessly as Stare Skill seated herself.
In free-fall, he brachiated from handhold to handhold like an armored gibbon.
Move down on the sausage-shaped body, skipping over the greasy folds like freshly turned furrows, all the way back to where the shoulders extend into twin flesh lumps attached to clusters of brachiating greenish-gray tentacles.
Judah walks days, crosses a trestle bridge aswarm with workers and Remade brachiating from extending simian arms.
Move down on the sausage-shaped body, skipping over the greasy folds like freshly turned furrows, all the way back to where the shoulders extend into twin flesh lumps attached to clusters of brachiating greenish-gray tentacles.
Rosa had actually brachiated, with her left arm holding onto long, ver- tical, reddish fibers that looked like vines dropping from the dark roof.
My brother had enjoyed the rainforests of Huthu very much, but though he could brachiate he could barely read, and we were all bright blue with skin-fungus.
In free-fall, he brachiated from handhold to handhold like an armored gibbon.
The only time he really noticed he had weight was when he missed a handhold as he brachiated through the starship.
He brachiated down the corridor till he came to the entrance to the large chamber.
Rosa had actually brachiated, with her left arm holding onto long, ver tical, reddish fibers that looked like vines dropping from the dark roof.
She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic.
Not being a specialist in biochemistry he had the advantage of nearly free-reined conjecture and used it to imagine a form of accelerated evolution (a process consisting, after all, of nothing more than life plus time) taking place in some lost fold of our genetic beginnings, long before the firemakers, the cave painters, the crafters of bone daggers, the brachiating primates, the bipeds who sucked nonopposable thumbs.