Word.ws English Dictionary

optant

optant noun: a person who lives in a region undergoing a change of sovereignty and thus may choose between retaining their old citizenship or opting for the citizenship of the new sovereignty.

Noun

optant (plural optants)

  1. A person who lives in a region undergoing a change of sovereignty and thus may choose between retaining their old citizenship or opting for the citizenship of the new sovereignty.
    • According to one authority, nearly 40,000 of the Sleswick Danes had become 'optants'—that is, had taken the 'option' of Danish nationality—or had emigrated, by the end of 1880.1914, W. R. Prior, Oxford Pamphlets: North Sleswick under Prussian Rule, London: Oxford University Press, page 9
  2. A person who opts into, out of, or for something.

Forms of optant

pluraloptants

Origin of optant

Partly (sense 1) borrowed from German Optant or Danish optant (both attested since 1907), partly from opt + ant.

Questions about optant

What does optant mean?
Optant means a person who lives in a region undergoing a change of sovereignty and thus may choose between retaining their old citizenship or opting for the citizenship of the new sovereignty.
What part of speech is optant?
Optant is a noun.
What is the plural of optant?
The plural of optant is optants.

Words near optant in the dictionary

  1. opt-outs
  2. opt.
  3. optable
  4. optacon
  5. optacons
  6. optant
  7. optants
  8. optate
  9. optated
  10. optates
  11. optating

Source and license

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