Word.ws English Dictionary

oviposit

oviposit verb: to lay eggs.

oviposit: to lay eggs
Image: Core A, Runckel C, Ivers J, Quock C, Siapno T, et al, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Verb

oviposit (third-person singular simple present oviposits, present participle ovipositing, simple past and past participle oviposited)

  1. (intransitive, zoology or paraphilia) To lay eggs.

Forms of oviposit

third-person singular presentoviposits
present participleovipositing
past participleoviposited
pastoviposited

Origin of oviposit

From ovi- (“egg”) + Latin pōsitus (“placed”), perfect passive participle of pōnere (“to place”).

Words formed from oviposit

Questions about oviposit

What does oviposit mean?
Oviposit means to lay eggs.
What part of speech is oviposit?
Oviposit is a verb.
What is the past tense of oviposit?
The past tense of oviposit is oviposited.

Words near oviposit in the dictionary

  1. oviparity
  2. oviparous
  3. oviparously
  4. oviparousness
  5. ovipary
  6. oviposit
  7. oviposited
  8. ovipositing
  9. oviposition
  10. ovipositional
  11. ovipositioning

Source and license

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