Word.ws English Dictionary

antennate

antennate verb: to bring one's antennae into contact with another insect.

Verb

antennate (third-person singular simple present antennates, present participle antennating, simple past and past participle antennated)

  1. To bring one's antennae into contact with another insect.
    • Workers attempt to avoid the queen, but if antennated try to escape or exhibit a submissive crouching posture, while the queen starts to bite and pull their legs and antennae.2005, Peter J.B. Slater, Jay S. Rosenblatt, Charles T. Snowdon, Advances in the Study of Behavior, →ISBN, page 10

Adjective

antennate (not comparable)

  1. (rare) Having antennae or a shaped-like form.
    • As reaction to humidity and activity level are usually closely linked it is therefore inadvisable to draw comparisons between strengths of response of de-antenate and antennate insects.1944, The Journal of Experimental Biology, volumes 20-23, page 156

Forms of antennate

third-person singular presentantennates
present participleantennating
past participleantennated
pastantennated

Origin of antennate

From antenna + -ate (verb-forming suffix).

From antenna + -ate (adjective-forming suffix).

Words formed from antennate

Questions about antennate

What does antennate mean?
Antennate means to bring one's antennae into contact with another insect.
What part of speech is antennate?
Antennate can be a verb or an adjective.
What is the past tense of antennate?
The past tense of antennate is antennated.

Words near antennate in the dictionary

  1. antennariid
  2. antennariids
  3. antennarity
  4. antennary
  5. antennas
  6. antennate
  7. antennated
  8. antennates
  9. antennating
  10. antennation
  11. antennations

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: antennate (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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