copulant

copulant noun: one engaged in sexual union.

Noun

copulant (plural copulants)

One engaged in sexual union.
- Those which produce copulable copulants in one individual are designated as monoecious, while those in which copulable copulants must come from different individuals are considered dioecious.1929 September, George K. K. Link, “Reproduction in Thallophytes, with special reference to fungi”, in The Botanical Gazette, volume 88, number 1
- Concerning the copulation positions of Turbellaria in general, Hyman (1951a:127) stated, "Usually the copulants face more or less away from each other with the genital regions pressed together and often elevated, the rest of the body attached to the subtratum.1959, The American Midland Naturalist - Volume 61, page 273
Something that brings other things together into a unified whole.
- It is well known from chemistry that a fatty or oily element will not of itself unite with a watery, but must be united by means of saline copulants.1912, Emanuel Swedenborg, Alfred Acton, The Animal Kingdom, page 345
A sign that represents the joining or unity of other signs.
- The copulants are likewise indispensable and have the property of being Continuant.1974, Charles Sanders Peirce ·, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce - Volume 7, page 236
- Since the classes are yielded by a static typology and not a dynamic process such as semiosis, it might be wiser to conceive the relation between subjects in terms of compatibility rather than state categorically that collectives determine copulants, for example: collectives are not only with the...2016, Tony Jappy, Peirce’s Twenty-Eight Classes of Signs and the Philosophy of Representation

Adjective

copulant (not comparable)

Signifying combination, identity or union.
- By virtue of Oi, namely the identity of the weather on that occasion, the sign expresses a distributive relation —to each situation of utterance there corresponds an identifiable weather type: the sign is therefore Copulant.1989, Gérard Deledalle, Semiotics and Pragmatics, page 149
- Copulant signs are, quite clearly, those signs whose immediate object is a continuous predicate.2017, Francesco Bellucci, Peirce's Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics

Examples of copulant in a sentence

In some turbellarians and monogenetic trematodes, the sperm are first aggregated into spermatophores which are discharged into the fellow copulant (Hyman, 1951).1993, Reproductive Biology of Invertebrates, Accessory Sex Glands, page 7:
Examples of such continuous immediate objects, with respect to which a sign is said to be a copulant, include "_ is _," "if _ then _," "_ relatively to _ for _," "Whatever _," etc.2017, Francesco Bellucci, Peirce's Speculative Grammar: Logic as Semiotics:
If the sign is copulant it is necessarily collective, and if it is an action-producing token, it is necessarily also categorical and percussive.2023, Tony Jappy, Developing a Neo-Peircean Approach to Signs, page 106:

Forms of copulant

plural	copulants

Origin of copulant

From Latin cōpulāns.

Questions about copulant

What does copulant mean?: Copulant means one engaged in sexual union.
How do you use copulant in a sentence?: In some turbellarians and monogenetic trematodes, the sperm are first aggregated into spermatophores which are discharged into the fellow copulant (Hyman, 1951).
What part of speech is copulant?: Copulant can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of copulant?: The plural of copulant is copulants.

Words near copulant in the dictionary

Adapted from Wiktionary: copulant (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: 2026-09-02

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