covary
covary verb: to vary together with another variable, particularly in a way that may be predictive.
Verb
covary (third-person singular simple present covaries, present participle covarying, simple past and past participle covaried)
- To vary together with another variable, particularly in a way that may be predictive
- More specifically, to say that there is an informative criterion of diachronic identity is to say that facts of diachronic identity covary with facts about continuants’ instantaneous qualitative profiles […].2007 July 18, Thomas Satting, “Identity in 4D”, in Philosophical Studies, volume 140, number 2, →DOI
- The participants certainly differ in how their practice is distributed (1, 2, or 3 days), but they also differ in how much total practice they get (3, 6, or 9 hours). This is a perfect example of a confound—it is impossible to tell if the results are due to one factor (distribution of practice) or...2009, C. James Goodwin, Research In Psychology: Methods and Design, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 175
Forms of covary
| third-person singular present | covaries |
|---|---|
| present participle | covarying |
| past participle | covaried |
| past | covaried |
Origin of covary
From co- + vary.
Questions about covary
- What does covary mean?
- Covary means to vary together with another variable, particularly in a way that may be predictive.
- What part of speech is covary?
- Covary is a verb.
- What is the past tense of covary?
- The past tense of covary is covaried.
Words near covary in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: covary (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:
Cite this entry: “covary.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/covary. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.