Word.ws English Dictionary

definiential

definiential adjective: pertaining to a definiens or to definientia (terms which provide a definition of another term).

Adjective

definiential

  1. (rare) Pertaining to a definiens or to definientia (terms which provide a definition of another term).
    • Non-human languages, on the other hand, may provide a degree of definiential precision (e.g., water 'H2O', three '3'), but they have extremely limited applicability. Definitions written in a human metalanguage all result in vicious circles, as if […]1983, Babel, volumes 29-31, page 139
    • In particular, both Cone [12] and Krenek 123] seem to undervalue the object-language metalanguage distinction in their worry over whether terms introduced with all due definiential care are the "intuitively right" ones, meta-linguistically, for ...1970, Benjamin Boretz, Meta-variations: studies in the foundations of musical thought, part 1, page 13

Origin of definiential

From definientia + -ial/-al.

Questions about definiential

What does definiential mean?
Definiential means pertaining to a definiens or to definientia (terms which provide a definition of another term).
What part of speech is definiential?
Definiential is an adjective.

Words near definiential in the dictionary

  1. definetly
  2. definienda
  3. definiendum
  4. definiens
  5. definientia
  6. definiential
  7. defining
  8. defining moment
  9. defining moments
  10. defining relative clause
  11. defining relative clauses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: definiential (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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