Word.ws English Dictionary

lactant

lactant adjective: lactating; producing milk.

Adjective

lactant (not comparable)

  1. lactating; producing milk.
    • Under the circumstances where the hypophysectomized mothers (and unexpectedly, two control mothers) could not lactate, a schedule for the re-shuffling of test young between lactant and non-lactant mothers was instituted ( this was arranged so that each test young was alternately under the care of a...1955, Mariano Dy-Liacco Obias, Maternal Behavior of Hypophysectomized Gravid Albino Rats and the Development and Performance of Their Progeny, page 23
    • […] to provide adequate diets to families which have either a pregnant or a lactant woman. It also shows that to provide an adequate diet to a family with a pregnant woman would cost Cr $8.34 / month ( Cr$60.34 ) less than to feed the same family with a lactant woman.1974, Paulo Roberto Silva, Estimating Least Cost Human Diets in the Northeast of Brazil with Stochastic Programming, page 123

Noun

lactant (plural lactants)

  1. A lactating mother; A mother who is suckling offspring.
    • Even if a lactant has taken a poison, it will, as the hitherto literature shows, scarcely be excreted into her milk.1950, The Tohoku Journal of Experimental Medicine, page 251
    • Given the evident toxicological impact of certain elements on lactants, and considering that the absorption of these is significantly higher than in adults, it is desirable that infant formulae are proportionally similar or inferior in levels of concentration to those supplying human milk2013, Navarro Blasco, I. Vill Elízaga, A. Martín Pérez, “Dietary Intake of Toxic Trace Elements in Infant Feeding”, in Jean Nève, Philippe Chappuis, Michel Lamand, editor, Therapeutic Uses of Trace...

Forms of lactant

plurallactants

Origin of lactant

From Latin lactans, present participle of lactare (“to suck”), from lac, lactis (“milk”).

Questions about lactant

What does lactant mean?
Lactant means lactating; producing milk.
What part of speech is lactant?
Lactant can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near lactant in the dictionary

  1. lactamide
  2. lactamides
  3. lactamization
  4. lactamizations
  5. lactams
  6. lactant
  7. lactants
  8. lactaptin
  9. lactarane
  10. lactard
  11. lactards

Source and license

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