Word.ws English Dictionary

nonselfs

nonselfs is the plural of nonself.

Meaning of nonself

Noun

nonself (countable and uncountable, plural nonselfs or nonselves)

  1. Any entity other than oneself.
    • In plants, the ability to recognize self from nonself plays an important role in fertilization, because self-fertilization will result in less diverse offspring than fertilization with pollen from another individual.2013 May-June, Katrina G. Claw, “Rapid Evolution in Eggs and Sperm”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 3
  2. (uncountable) All agents and substances that are not the body's own.
    • In his classic monograph describing the clonal selection theory of the immune response, Burnet (1959) suggested that the immune system distinguishes between self (no antibody response) and nonself (antibody response).1961, George F. Vande Woude, George Klein, Advances in Cancer Research
  3. Anatta.

See all 4 meanings of nonself

Questions about nonselfs

What is nonselfs the plural of?
Nonselfs is the plural of nonself.

Words near nonselfs in the dictionary

  1. nonselectivity
  2. nonselenium
  3. nonself
  4. nonselfadjoint
  5. nonselfdual
  6. nonselfs
  7. nonselling
  8. nonselves
  9. nonsemantic
  10. nonseminal
  11. nonseminoma

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nonselfs (page history and authors); nonself (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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