Word.ws English Dictionary

in-bred

in-bred is the alternative form of inbred.

Meaning of inbred

Adjective

inbred (comparative more inbred, superlative most inbred)

  1. Bred within; innate.
    • We who from daily experience knew Miss Smedley like a book—were we not only too well aware that she had neither accomplishments nor charms—no characteristic, in fact, but an inbred viciousness of temper and disposition?1899, Kenneth Grahame, The Golden Age/A White-washed Uncle
    Synonyms:
    inborn
  2. (derogatory, often) Having an ancestry characterized by inbreeding.
  3. Describing a strain produced through successive generations of inbreeding resulting in a population of genetically identical individuals which are homozygous at all genetic loci.
  4. (figuratively) Insular or self-contained, primarily interacting with and drawing upon one another.
    • The Lavender Quill Society, that group of in-bred Manhattan gay writers who believe that gay literature begins and ends in their clique (outsiders need not apply for membership).1987 April 4, T.R. Witomski, “witomski responds to readers' response to witomski (letter)”, in Gay Community News, page 6

See all 6 meanings of inbred

Forms of in-bred

comparativemore in-bred
superlativemost in-bred

Questions about in-bred

What is in-bred the alternative form of?
In-bred is the alternative form of inbred.

Words near in-bred in the dictionary

  1. in-box
  2. in-boxed
  3. in-boxes
  4. in-boxing
  5. in-bread
  6. in-bred
  7. in-built
  8. in-cabin
  9. in-calf
  10. in-circuit
  11. in-class

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: in-bred (page history and authors); inbred (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: “in-bred.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/in-bred. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.