Word.ws English Dictionary

r-selection

r-selection noun: a theory involving natural selection based on quantity.

Noun

r-selection (uncountable)

  1. A theory involving natural selection based on quantity.

Origin of r-selection

Coined by the American ecologists Robert H. MacArthur and E. O. Wilson in 1967. The choice of the letter r came from rate.

Questions about r-selection

What does r-selection mean?
R-selection means a theory involving natural selection based on quantity.
What part of speech is r-selection?
R-selection is a noun.

Words near r-selection in the dictionary

  1. r-process
  2. r-processes
  3. R-R
  4. R-rated
  5. R-Rs
  6. r-selection
  7. R-shaped
  8. r-slur
  9. r-slurred
  10. r-slurs
  11. r-tard

Source and license

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