Word.ws English Dictionary

kairomone

Syllables: kai·ro·mone/ˈkaɪɹə(ʊ)məʊn/US/ˈkaɪɹəˌmoʊn/

kairomone noun: any substance produced by an individual of one species (often an insect) that benefits the recipient which is of a different species but is harmful to the producer.

kairomone: any substance produced by an individual of one species (often an insect) that benefits the...
Image: Gilles San Martin from Namur, Belgium, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

kairomone (plural kairomones)

  1. Any substance produced by an individual of one species (often an insect) that benefits the recipient which is of a different species but is harmful to the producer.
    • Among these substances, we propose to designate two major functional groupings by the terms allomone and kairomone, chosen as intentional parallels to the term pheromone.[1970 January, William L[acy] Brown, Jr.; Thomas Eisner; Robert H[arding] Whittaker, “Allomones and Kairomones: Transspecific Chemical Messengers”, in BioScience, volume 20, number 1, Washington...
    • Host‐finding by the parasitic wasp Orgilus lepidus, a braconid parasite, is mediated by two kairomones present in the frass of the host insect, the potato tuberworm.1973 December, L. B. Hendry, P. D. Greany, R. J. Gill, “Kairomone Mediated Host‐finding Behavior in the Parasitic Wasp Orgilus lepidus”, in Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata, volume 16, number...

kairomone meaning in Tamil and Persian

kairomone in Tamil

பயிரி மணவீச்சு

kairomone in Persian

any substance produced by an individual of one species that benefits the recipient which is of a different species but is harmful to the producer
کایرومون

Forms of kairomone

pluralkairomones

Origin of kairomone

Blend of Ancient Greek καιρός (kairós, “advantage; profit”, noun) + English pheromone, coined in the 1970 article “Allomones and Kairomones: Transspecific Chemical Messengers” by the American geneticist William Lacy Brown, Jr. (1913–1991), the German-American ecologist and entomologist Thomas Eisner (1929–2011), and the American ecologist Robert Harding Whittaker (1920–1980) which was published in BioScience: see the quotation.

Words formed from kairomone

Questions about kairomone

What does kairomone mean?
Kairomone means any substance produced by an individual of one species (often an insect) that benefits the recipient which is of a different species but is harmful to the producer.
What is kairomone in Tamil?
Kairomone in Tamil is பயிரி மணவீச்சு. See Kairomone meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is kairomone?
Kairomone is a noun.
How do you pronounce kairomone?
Kairomone is pronounced /ˈkaɪɹə(ʊ)məʊn/ (UK).
What is the plural of kairomone?
The plural of kairomone is kairomones.

Words near kairomone in the dictionary

  1. kairines
  2. kairo cancer
  3. kairoi
  4. kairoline
  5. kairomonal
  6. kairomone
  7. kairomones
  8. kairos
  9. kairotic
  10. Kairouan
  11. Kairouani

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: kairomone (page history and authors); kairomone (Tamil Wiktionary) (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-kairomone.wav.

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