Word.ws English Dictionary

adjuvant

Syllables: ad·juv·antUK/ˈæd͡ʒʊv(ə)nt//ˈæd͡ʒəv(ə)nt/

adjuvant adjective: providing assistance or help; assistive, facilitative, helpful.

adjuvant: providing assistance or help; assistive, facilitative, helpful
Image: Alcibiades, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Adjective

adjuvant (comparative more adjuvant, superlative most adjuvant)

  1. (formal) Providing assistance or help; assistive, facilitative, helpful.
  2. Enhancing the immune response to an antigen; also, containing a substance having such an effect.
  3. Of a form of therapy or treatment: additional, supplementary; specifically (oncology), of a cancer treatment: given after removal of a primary tumour.
    • Adjuvant chemotherapy, [Paul] Carbone conjectured, could be the surgeon's little helper. It would eradicate microscopic deposits of cancer left behind after surgery, thus extirpating any remnant reservoirs of malignancy in the body in early breast cancer— […]2010, Siddhartha Mukherjee, “Halsted’s Ashes”, in The Emperor of all Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, New York, N.Y.: Scribner, →ISBN, page 219

Noun

adjuvant (plural adjuvants)

  1. (formal) An additive (often a separate product) that enhances the efficacy of a pesticide, but has little or no pesticidal effect itself.
    Synonyms:
    accessory, attendant
  2. (formal) A substance enhancing the immune response to an antigen.
    • The well-known tropic action of immune serum as an adjuvant to phagocytosis suggested early in our studies that we might here be dealing with a similar phenomenon.1914 November, Frederick P. Gay, Edith J[ane] Claypole, “Specific Hyperleukocytosis: Studies in Typhoid Immunization”, in Archives of Internal Medicine, volume XIV, number 5, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC...
    Synonyms:
    accessory, attendant
  3. (formal) A form of therapy or treatment which is additional or supplementary to another, or which enhances the effectiveness of another.
    Synonyms:
    accessory, attendant
  4. (archaic, formal) An additive which aids or modifies the action of the principal ingredient of a drug.
    Synonyms:
    accessory, attendant

adjuvant meaning in Tamil, Urdu and Kannada

adjuvant in Tamil

துணை மருந்துப் பொருள், துணை, துணையம், துணையூக்கி, துணை மருந்துப்பொருள், உதவிசெய்பவர்

adjuvant in Urdu

مدد گار

adjuvant in Kannada

ನೆರವಿಕ, ಸಹಾಯಕ

Synonyms of adjuvant

All synonyms of adjuvant

Forms of adjuvant

Adjective
comparativemore adjuvant
superlativemost adjuvant
Noun
pluraladjuvants

Origin of adjuvant

Learned borrowing from Latin adiuvant-, adjuvant- + English -ant (suffix forming adjectives with the sense ‘exhibiting a condition or process’; and forming agent nouns). Adiuvant-, adjuvant- are oblique stems of adiuvāns, adjuvāns (“assisting, helping”), the present active participle of adiuvō (“to assist, help; to be useful; etc.”), from ad- (“prefix meaning ‘to; toward’”) + iuvō (“to aid, help; to save”) (possibly from Proto-Indo-European *h₁ewH- (“to assist, help; to save”)). Adjective sense 3 (“of a form of therapy or treatment: additional, supplementary”) and noun sense 1.4 (“additive which aids or modifies the action of the principal ingredient of a drug”) are possibly derived from French adjuvant (adjective, noun).

Words formed from adjuvant

Phrases with adjuvant

Questions about adjuvant

What does adjuvant mean?
Adjuvant means providing assistance or help; assistive, facilitative, helpful.
What is adjuvant in Tamil?
Adjuvant in Tamil is துணை மருந்துப் பொருள், துணை, துணையம். See Adjuvant meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is adjuvant?
Adjuvant can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce adjuvant?
Adjuvant is pronounced /ˈæd͡ʒʊv(ə)nt/ (UK).

Words near adjuvant in the dictionary

  1. adjutrix
  2. adjuvance
  3. adjuvances
  4. adjuvancies
  5. adjuvancy
  6. adjuvant
  7. adjuvant therapies
  8. adjuvant therapy
  9. adjuvantation
  10. adjuvantations
  11. adjuvanted

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: adjuvant (page history and authors); adjuvant (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); adjuvant (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); adjuvant (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-NaomiAmethyst-adjuvant.wav.

Cite this entry: “adjuvant.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/adjuvant. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.