Word.ws English Dictionary

emboîtement

emboîtement noun: the outdated hypothesis that all living things proceed from pre-existing germs, and that these encase the germs of all future living things, enclosed one within another.

Noun

emboîtement (uncountable)

  1. (historical) The outdated hypothesis that all living things proceed from pre-existing germs, and that these encase the germs of all future living things, enclosed one within another.
    • [R]ivals professed to see an equivalent in the semen, giving rise to the ‘preformation’ or emboîtement theories which contended that the new individual was completely developed as a tiny homunculus from the moment of conception.1997, Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, Folio Society, published 2016, page 217

Origin of emboîtement

From French emboîtement.

Questions about emboîtement

What does emboîtement mean?
Emboîtement means the outdated hypothesis that all living things proceed from pre-existing germs, and that these encase the germs of all future living things, enclosed one within another.
What part of speech is emboîtement?
Emboîtement is a noun.

Words near emboîtement in the dictionary

  1. embows
  2. embox
  3. emboxed
  4. emboxes
  5. emboxing
  6. emboîtement
  7. Embra
  8. embracability
  9. embracable
  10. embrace
  11. embrace the penguin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: emboîtement (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: “emboîtement.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/embo%C3%AEtement. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.