Word.ws English Dictionary

mirasorvone

mirasorvone noun: a defensive compound secreted by the sunburst diving beetle (Thermonectus marmoratus).

Noun

mirasorvone (uncountable)

  1. A defensive compound secreted by the sunburst diving beetle (Thermonectus marmoratus).
    • Two major volatile components of this secretion are steroids; cybisterone (structure 7) constitutes about 20% of the volatiles, and a new steroid, mirasorvone, about 50%.1998 March 17, J Meinwald, “Mirasorvone: A masked 20-ketopregnane from the defensive secretion of a diving beetle (Thermonectus marmoratus)”, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...
    • In one particularly beautiful dytiscid, the speckled Thermonectus marmoratus, the secretion contains two steroids, cybisterone (74) and mirasorvone (75). The former compound occurs in other dytiscids as well, but mirasorvone, an 18-oxygenated steroid, is not known from other insects.2005, Thomas Eisner, Secret Weapons: Defenses of Insects, Spiders, Scorpions, and Other Many-legged Creatures

Origin of mirasorvone

Mira + Sorvino + -one. Named after American actress Mira Sorvino. Coined by American entymologist Thomas Eisner. Eisner chose to name the secretion after Sorvino, in memory of the good times that Eisner had training Sovino as an ersatz etymologist, for her role in the 1997 U.S. horror film Mimic.

Questions about mirasorvone

What does mirasorvone mean?
Mirasorvone means a defensive compound secreted by the sunburst diving beetle (Thermonectus marmoratus).
What part of speech is mirasorvone?
Mirasorvone is a noun.

Words near mirasorvone in the dictionary

  1. mirasidari
  2. mirasidaris
  3. mirasidars
  4. mirasol
  5. mirasols
  6. mirasorvone
  7. mirasudar
  8. mirate
  9. mirated
  10. mirates
  11. mirating

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mirasorvone (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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