intercross
intercross verb: to cross back over one another.
Verb
intercross (third-person singular simple present intercrosses, present participle intercrossing, simple past and past participle intercrossed)
- To cross back over one another
- From this trunk, like a tower, rose an enormous tenfold ramification, the branches of which crossed and intercrossed, and forked and developed, […]1895, Jules Verne, Captain Antifer, page 134
- To breed two strains having a common ancestry with one another
- A species varies occasionally in two directions, but owing to their free intercrossing they (the variations) never increase.1916, Alfred Russel Wallace, Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1
Noun
intercross (plural intercrosses)
- The act or product of intercrossing
- Intercrosses are particularly useful with recessive mutations maintained in a small colony.2000, Xavier Montagutelli, “Determining the Genetic Basis of a New Trait”, in Sundberg & Boggess, editors, Systematic Approach to Evaluation of Mouse Mutations, →ISBN, page 20
Forms of intercross
| Verb | |
|---|---|
| third-person singular present | intercrosses |
| present participle | intercrossing |
| past participle | intercrossed |
| past | intercrossed |
| Noun | |
| plural | intercrosses |
Origin of intercross
From inter- + cross.
Questions about intercross
- What does intercross mean?
- Intercross means to cross back over one another.
- What part of speech is intercross?
- Intercross can be a verb or a noun.
- What is the past tense of intercross?
- The past tense of intercross is intercrossed.
Words near intercross in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: intercross (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: “intercross.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/intercross. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.