Word.ws English Dictionary

heteroclitic

heteroclitic adjective: irregular in inflection.

Adjective

heteroclitic (comparative more heteroclitic, superlative most heteroclitic)

  1. Irregular in inflection.
  2. (Indo-European-studies) Signifying a nominal stem which alternates between more than one form when declined for grammatical case, particularly in the suffix (such as between *-r̥- in the strong stem and *-n̥- in the weak stem).
    • The Proto-Indo-European term *wódr̥ (“water”) is typical of nouns with heteroclitic stems: the strong stem *wódr̥- occurs in the direct cases while the weak stem *wédn̥- is found instead in the oblique cases, hence the contrast between nominative *wódr̥ and genitive *wédn̥s.
  3. Pertaining to antibodies that react to a wide variety of antigens.
    • […] a heteroclitic response was never observed after the immunization with the deamidated peptide […]2011, Eric J. Toone, Advances in Enzymology and Related Areas of Molecular Biology, page 300

Noun

heteroclitic (plural heteroclitics)

  1. A heteroclitic noun.

Forms of heteroclitic

Adjective
comparativemore heteroclitic
superlativemost heteroclitic
Noun
pluralheteroclitics

Origin of heteroclitic

From hetero- + clitic.

Questions about heteroclitic

What does heteroclitic mean?
Heteroclitic means irregular in inflection.
What part of speech is heteroclitic?
Heteroclitic can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near heteroclitic in the dictionary

  1. heterocladic
  2. heteroclinic
  3. heteroclisis
  4. heteroclite
  5. heteroclites
  6. heteroclitic
  7. heteroclitical
  8. heterocliticity
  9. heterocliticon
  10. heteroclitics
  11. heteroclitous

Source and license

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