Word.ws English Dictionary

pretergeneration

pretergeneration noun: preternatural generation; monstrous birth.

Noun

pretergeneration (plural pretergenerations)

  1. (rare) Preternatural generation; monstrous birth
    • In the Novum Organum Bacon made a threefold division of natural history: the first being concerned with species, the second with monsters, and the third with artificial products; or the history of generation, pretergeneration and arts.1958, Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science: The seventeenth century
    • Because Bacon does not provide any analysis of pretergenerations in his natural histories, I claim that the process of generating artificial individuals that deviate from their species exhibits important aspects of Bacon's view on how nature is constrained and deviated from its own course.2019, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Contingency and Natural Order in Early Modern Science, page 183

Forms of pretergeneration

pluralpretergenerations

Questions about pretergeneration

What does pretergeneration mean?
Pretergeneration means preternatural generation; monstrous birth.
What part of speech is pretergeneration?
Pretergeneration is a noun.
What is the plural of pretergeneration?
The plural of pretergeneration is pretergenerations.

Words near pretergeneration in the dictionary

  1. pretenure
  2. preter-
  3. preter-human
  4. pretercanine
  5. preterfluent
  6. pretergeneration
  7. pretergenerations
  8. pretergite
  9. pretergites
  10. pretergression
  11. preterhuman

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pretergeneration (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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