Word.ws English Dictionary

polyphenic

polyphenic adjective: having multiple phenotypes that can arise as a result of differing environmental conditions.

Adjective

polyphenic (not comparable)

  1. Having multiple phenotypes that can arise as a result of differing environmental conditions.
    • Both types of threshold mechanism have been shown to couple horn growth with nutrition in scarab beetles and are considered facultative (polyphenic) regulatory processes, and preliminary evidence suggested that they might sometimes both be present in the same species.2009 February 6, J. Mark Rowland, Douglas J. Emlen, “Two Thresholds, Three Male Forms Result in Facultative Male Trimorphism in Beetles”, in Science, volume 323, number 5915, →DOI, pages 773–776

Questions about polyphenic

What does polyphenic mean?
Polyphenic means having multiple phenotypes that can arise as a result of differing environmental conditions.
What part of speech is polyphenic?
Polyphenic is an adjective.

Words near polyphenic in the dictionary

  1. polyphemus moths
  2. polyphemuses
  3. polyphemusin
  4. polyphene
  5. polyphenes
  6. polyphenic
  7. polyphenism
  8. polyphenisms
  9. polyphenol
  10. polyphenolic
  11. polyphenolics

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: polyphenic (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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