Word.ws English Dictionary

perisexual

perisexual adjective: related to sex or sex-seeking, without being explicitly sexual.

Adjective

perisexual (not comparable)

  1. Related to sex or sex-seeking, without being explicitly sexual.
    • Ritual beatings were his first perisexual experiences, and they are vividly and enthusiastically remembered and described in his letters.1965, Jeremy Mitchell, “Swinburne - The Disappointed Protagonist”, in Yale French Studies, volume 35, →JSTOR, pages 81–88
    • Since he has just clarified the Edo tendency to distinguish between perisexual and sexual acts, convincingly showing that male-male sexual acts were not problematized before the Meiji period, his position on this issue is not particularly persuasive.2000, Margaret H. Childs, “(Review of) Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950 by Gregory M. Pflugfelder”, in Monumenta Nipponica, volume 55, number 3, →JSTOR...

Origin of perisexual

From peri- + sexual.

Questions about perisexual

What does perisexual mean?
Perisexual means related to sex or sex-seeking, without being explicitly sexual.
What part of speech is perisexual?
Perisexual is an adjective.

Words near perisexual in the dictionary

  1. periselectivity
  2. periselene
  3. periselenium
  4. periseptal
  5. perisex
  6. perisexual
  7. perish
  8. perish the thought
  9. Perish Trap
  10. perish'd
  11. perishabilities

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: perisexual (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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