Word.ws English Dictionary

cercous

cercous adjective: waxy.

Adjective

cercous (comparative more cercous, superlative most cercous)

  1. Waxy.
    • For "making light of cercous things" Was a very wick-ed profession!1904, John Godfrey Saxe, “Woman”, in Of tragedy, of humor
    • One of the most striking characteristics of the Chinese maize was the nature of the endosperm, which was neither horny, starchy, nor sweet, after the manner of American varieties, but constituted a distinceet class, termed waxy or cercous because of the resemblance in texture and optical properties...1913, G. N. Collins, J. H. Kempton, “Inheritance of Waxy Endosperm in Hybrids of Chinese Maize”, in Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Genetics, page 347

Forms of cercous

comparativemore cercous
superlativemost cercous

Origin of cercous

From Latin cera (“wax”).

Questions about cercous

What does cercous mean?
Cercous means waxy.
What part of speech is cercous?
Cercous is an adjective.

Words near cercous in the dictionary

  1. cercosporoid
  2. cercosporoids
  3. cercotractor
  4. cercotractors
  5. Cercottes
  6. cercous
  7. cercozoa
  8. cercozoan
  9. cercozoans
  10. cercus
  11. Cerda

Source and license

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