Word.ws English Dictionary

heterodontism

heterodontism noun: having a dentition of differing teeth.

Noun

heterodontism (uncountable)

  1. Having a dentition of differing teeth.
    • Now that all mammals are led back to a distant diphyodont stem, it is also true that the further we go back both in palingenesis and embryogenesis, the more widespread heterodontism is—all modern homodontism proving to be secondary.1894, “Address by Henry Fairfield Osborn”, in Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, volume 42, page 197

Antonyms of heterodontism

Origin of heterodontism

From heterodont + -ism.

Questions about heterodontism

What does heterodontism mean?
Heterodontism means having a dentition of differing teeth.
What part of speech is heterodontism?
Heterodontism is a noun.

Words near heterodontism in the dictionary

  1. heterodont
  2. heterodontid
  3. heterodontids
  4. heterodontin
  5. heterodontins
  6. heterodontism
  7. heterodontosaur
  8. heterodontosaurid
  9. heterodontosaurids
  10. heterodontosaurs
  11. heterodonts

Source and license

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