either of two stocky, oxlike antelopes of the genus Connochaetes, the silver-gray, white-bearded C. taurinus of the eastern African plain and the black, white-tailed C. gnou of central South Africa: recently near extinction, the South African gnu is now protected.
either of two sturdy antelopes, Connochaetes taurinus (brindled gnu) or the much rarer C. gnou (white-tailed gnu), inhabiting the savannas of Africa, having an oxlike head and a long tufted tail Also called wildebeest
Word Origin
C18: from Xhosa nqu
Word Origin and History for gnus
gnu
n.
1777, gnoo, from Dutch gnoe, used by German traveler Georg Forster (1754-1794) to render Hottentot i-ngu "wildebeest," from Southern Bushman !nu: (in which ! and : represent clicks).
gnus in Technology
tool, networking GNU news. A GNUEmacs subsystem for reading and sending Usenetnews, written by Masanobu Umeda . You can use GNUS to browse through news groups, look at summaries of articles in a specific group, and read articles of interest. You can respond to authors or write articles or replies to all the readers of a news group. GNUS can be configured to use the NNTPprotocol to get news from a remove server or it can read it from local news spool files. Usenet newsgorup: news:gnu.emacs.gnus. (1995-05-04)