allosexual
/ˌæloʊˈsɛkʃuəl/
allosexual adjective: experiencing sexual attraction; not asexual.
Adjective
allosexual
- Experiencing sexual attraction; not asexual.
- Gray-asexual [denotes] a person who is somewhere between 100% asexual and allosexual; they might only experience sexual attraction on very rare occasions, […]2014, Nicole Wiesenthal, “What it means to be asexual”, in The Mirror, number Fall, page 19
- Sexual assault is alarmingly common, yet most victims still identify as heterosexual, cisgender and allosexual (the opposite of asexual) after the trauma. Being sexual assaulted did not make me asexual, […]2014 March 20, a letter to the editor of The Record, volume 116, number 20, page 6
- LGB; queer; non-heterosexual.
- Yet we later learn that Diana Baring already knew the secret — whether being “half—caste" references being lower-caste with “black blood” (more than a racial marker) or being transsexual, homosexual, or allosexual.2005, Tom Cohen, Hitchcock's Cryptonymies, volume 2, →ISBN, page 58
- Diane Bourgeois (Terrebonne—Blainville, BQ): Mr. Speaker, last month in my riding, Gaétan Lord won the jury prize at the Allostars Gala for his contribution as founding president of Canada's first centre for “allosexual” or queer youth, which offers support to gays, lesbians and young people who...2006, House of Commons Debates, numbers 27-40, page 1595
- Antonyms:
- heterosexual
- Directed toward or involving another person rather than (only) oneself.
- Allosexual behavior peaked during the follicular phase for both heterosexual women and lesbians.2002, Mary H Burleson et al., “Sexual behavior in lesbian and heterosexual women: relations with menstrual cycle phase and partner availability”, in Psychoneuroendocrinology, volume 27, number 4...
- Allosexual behavior was positively related to libido, and negatively related to positive and "premenstrual" emotional factors. Autosexual behavior was predicted by libido and an energetic / creative emotional factor.2011 August, Susan G. Brown, Marites J. Calibuso, Amanda L. Roedl, “Women’s Sexuality, Well-Being, and the Menstrual Cycle: Methodological issues and their interrelationships”, in Archives of Sexual...
- Antonyms:
- autosexual
- Involving or directed at the other biological sex; heterosexual; not isosexual.
- Dr. Conigliaro contended that the sharing of the same bedroom by a single parent and child of the opposite sex "could contribute to, or cause, an excessive degree of ‘allosexual identifications’, [where a child identifies with the parent of the opposite sex] […]"1980, Federal supplement, series 1, volume 476, page 1330
- […] We performed 45 experimental confrontations with heterospecific pairs. Confrontations (C. talarum vs C. australis) included allosexual and isosexual encounters.1992 February, Aldo I Vassallo, Christina Busch, “Interspecific agonism between two sympatric species of Ctenomys (Rodentia: Octodontidae) in captivity”, in Behaviour, volume 120, number 1/2, pages...
- Synonyms:
- other-sexual
- Antonyms:
- isosexual, homosexual
Noun
allosexual (plural allosexuals)
- One who experiences sexual attraction; one who is not asexual.
- […] that is par for the course of being any form of queer-identified. But it also allows allies and allosexuals (persons who experience sexual attraction) to push out asexual and aromantic-identified individuals.2014 October 15, Z Colburn, “"A" is for annoyed”, in The Easterner, volume 66, number 4, page 8
- A chart of the Ace Spectrum: the different possibilities for asexuals, demisexuals, and allosexuals.2014 November, Krista Rhoades, “Asexual Awareness Week”, in Collide, number 22, page 5
Synonyms of allosexual
Antonyms
Forms of allosexual
| plural | allosexuals |
|---|
Origin of allosexual
From allo- (“other”) + sexual. "Directed at or involving another rather than one's self" and "involving the other sex; heterosexual" are the most etymologically literal senses (regarding the latter sense, compare the structure of heterosexual), structural and semantic opposites of autosexual and isosexual. The sense "non-heterosexual" was influenced by (and had influence on) Canadian French allosexuel.
Questions about allosexual
- What does allosexual mean?
- Allosexual means experiencing sexual attraction; not asexual.
- What part of speech is allosexual?
- Allosexual can be an adjective or a noun.
- How do you pronounce allosexual?
- Allosexual is pronounced /ˌæloʊˈsɛkʃuəl/.
Words near allosexual in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: allosexual (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.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-allosexual.wav.
Cite this entry: “allosexual.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/allosexual. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.