Word.ws English Dictionary

entention

entention noun: reference to something not necessarily present; as a book might discuss mathematics without presenting any mathematics in the text, or a tool might be manufactured for dealing with objects not present at the time of manufacture; DNA encodes information for dealing with processes that are not underway at its formation. Also the obsolete form of intention.

Noun

entention (plural ententions)

  1. (neologism) Reference to something not necessarily present; as a book might discuss mathematics without presenting any mathematics in the text, or a tool might be manufactured for dealing with objects not present at the time of manufacture; DNA encodes information for dealing with processes that are not underway at its formation.
    • ...when referring to all such phenomena in general, I will use entention to characterize their internal relationship to a telos — an end, or otherwise displaced and thus non-present something, or possible something.
    • ...at the very moment this lion popped into existence, before even one beat of its heart, at that instant these tendencies were present and the entention was present as well, if these processes are poised to begin and proceed in a way that preserves the whole lion.Terrence W. Deacon in Incomplete Nature 2012

Also used as

entention is also the obsolete form of intention.

Forms of entention

pluralententions

Questions about entention

What does entention mean?
Entention means reference to something not necessarily present; as a book might discuss mathematics without presenting any mathematics in the text, or a tool might be manufactured for dealing with objects not present at the time of manufacture; DNA encodes information for dealing with processes that are not underway at its formation.
What part of speech is entention?
Entention is a noun.
What is the plural of entention?
The plural of entention is ententions.

Words near entention in the dictionary

  1. entente cordiale
  2. entente-cordiale
  3. ententes
  4. ententes cordiales
  5. ententes-cordiales
  6. entention
  7. ententional
  8. ententions
  9. ententive
  10. entents
  11. entepicondylar

Source and license

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