Word.ws English Dictionary

Peto's paradox

Peto's paradox proper noun: the observation that at the species level, the incidence of cancer does not appear to correlate with the number of cells in an organism.

Proper noun

Peto's paradox

  1. The observation that at the species level, the incidence of cancer does not appear to correlate with the number of cells in an organism.
    • Peto's paradox has the clear implication that somehow longer-lived species are better protected from cancer than shorter-lived ones and, likewise, bigger species are better protected than smaller ones.2013, Jonathan Silvertown, The Long and the Short of It: The Science of Life Span and Aging

Origin of Peto's paradox

After Richard Peto.

Questions about Peto's paradox

What does Peto's paradox mean?
Peto's paradox means the observation that at the species level, the incidence of cancer does not appear to correlate with the number of cells in an organism.
What part of speech is Peto's paradox?
Peto's paradox is a proper noun.

Words near Peto's paradox in the dictionary

  1. petnappers
  2. petnapping
  3. petnappings
  4. petnaps
  5. Peto
  6. Peto's paradox
  7. Petone
  8. petong
  9. Petoniak
  10. Petorca
  11. Petos

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Peto's paradox (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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