A hominid is a member of the scientific family that includes human beings and our closest animal relatives. In older schoolbooks, hominid often meant “humans and the extinct walking apes we came from” — fossils like Australopithecus, Neanderthals, and so on — and it left chimpanzees and gorillas out. Many scientists now use the family Hominidae more widely, for the great apes: humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. So two books may not mean the same group; the tidy classroom picture has moved. It is a biology and museum word, not a chatting word. In daily life you say humans; you say hominid when you are sorting bones, family trees, or labels in a glass case. It is not humanoid, which is mostly a science-fiction word for something merely shaped like a person.