A sloth hangs upside down in the trees and barely moves, while an anteater keeps busy on the ground hoovering up ants and termites with its long snout and sticky tongue. Sloth also does double duty as the word for laziness itself.
The core difference
A sloth is a slow-moving tree-dweller (and a word for laziness), while an anteater is a long-snouted mammal that feeds on ants and termites.
- sloth — a slow-moving, tree-dwelling mammal native to Central and South America; also laziness: The sloth hung upside down from a branch, barely moving.
- anteater — a long-snouted mammal that uses its sticky tongue to slurp up ants and termites: The giant anteater can flick its tongue in and out of an ant nest dozens of times a second.
How to tell them apart
Picture where each one lives: a sloth spends its life in the trees, moving so little that algae can grow on its fur, while an anteater is a ground forager, using its long snout to break into ant nests and termite mounds. Neither animal looks much like the other once you picture the snout — an anteater's is long and tapered, built for digging into insect colonies, while a sloth's face is short and rounded.
Sloth is also an everyday English word for laziness, a sense that came first and gave the animal its name, not the other way round. Anteater has no such double life — it's a straightforward compound of ant and eater, and it stays literal.
