Word.ws English Dictionary

conatus

/kəʊˈneɪ.təs/US/koʊˈneɪ.təs/

conatus noun: an effort, an endeavour, a striving.

Noun

conatus (plural conatuses or conatus)

  1. An effort, an endeavour, a striving.
    1. Such a striving effort that is a life force.
      • Creationists commonly doctor the Second Law of Thermodynamics to claim that biological evolution, an increase in order over time, is physically impossible. The part of the law they omit is “in a closed system.” Organisms are open systems: they capture energy from the sun, food, or ocean vents to...2018, Steven Pinker, “Chapter 2: Entro, Evo, Info”, in Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Penguin, →ISBN
  2. A force or impulse.
    • [E]ach part so moved does by that motion exert a conatus of protruding and displacing all the adjacent Particles.1665, Robert Hooke, Micrographia
    Synonyms:
    nisus

Synonyms of conatus

Forms of conatus

pluralconatuses
pluralconatus

Origin of conatus

Borrowed from Latin cōnātus.

Questions about conatus

What does conatus mean?
Conatus means an effort, an endeavour, a striving.
What part of speech is conatus?
Conatus is a noun.
How do you pronounce conatus?
Conatus is pronounced /kəʊˈneɪ.təs/ (UK).
What is the plural of conatus?
The plural of conatus is conatuses.

Words near conatus in the dictionary

  1. conativists
  2. Conatser
  3. Conatsers
  4. conatumumab
  5. conatural
  6. conatus
  7. conatuses
  8. Conaty
  9. Conatys
  10. Conaway
  11. Conaways

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: conatus (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-conatus.wav.

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