Word.ws English Dictionary

enate

enate noun: a relative whose relation is traced only through female members of the family.

Noun

enate (plural enates)

  1. A relative whose relation is traced only through female members of the family.
    • A great-grandmother is an enate if she is your mother’s mother's mother.
    • Similarly, since the wearing of a sawat is importantly informed by matrilineal group membership — an enate of the deceased cannot wear a sawat — it would be an error to assume that matrilineal group membership is necessarily salient in explaining the behavior of a social actor.2000, Alexander H. Bolyanatz, Mortuary Feasting on New Ireland: The Activation of Matriliny Among the Sursurunga, page 86
  2. Any maternal female relative.

Adjective

enate (comparative more enate, superlative most enate)

  1. Related to someone by female connections.
  2. Related on the maternal side of the family.
  3. Having identical grammatical structure (but with elements that are semantically different).
  4. Growing out.

Synonyms of enate

Antonyms

Forms of enate

Noun
pluralenates
Adjective
comparativemore enate
superlativemost enate

Origin of enate

From Latin ēnātus.

Questions about enate

What does enate mean?
Enate means a relative whose relation is traced only through female members of the family.
What part of speech is enate?
Enate can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of enate?
The plural of enate is enates.

Words near enate in the dictionary

  1. enarthronotes
  2. enarthroses
  3. enarthrosis
  4. ENAs
  5. enascent
  6. enate
  7. enates
  8. enatic
  9. enatiomeric
  10. enation
  11. enations

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: enate (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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