Word.ws English Dictionary

retardant

retardant adjective: serving to impede (slow down) the action of something.

Adjective

retardant (comparative more retardant, superlative most retardant)

  1. (in-compounds, often) Serving to impede (slow down) the action of something

Noun

retardant (plural retardants)

  1. (in-compounds, often) Something that serves to retard (slow down) the action of something.
    • It took until last year for mattresses and furniture containing the highly toxic retardant deca-BDE to be banned, under European law, from sale. […] To make matters worse, far from saving us from fires, flame retardants appear to increase the risk.2020 February 26, George Monbiot, “Toxic sofas are a secret scandal – and an ‘EU red tape’ bonfire will make it worse”, in The Guardian

Forms of retardant

Adjective
comparativemore retardant
superlativemost retardant
Noun
pluralretardants

Origin of retardant

Borrowed from French retardant, equivalent to retard (“to slow down”) + -ant.

Words formed from retardant

Questions about retardant

What does retardant mean?
Retardant means serving to impede (slow down) the action of something.
What part of speech is retardant?
Retardant can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near retardant in the dictionary

  1. retardable
  2. retardance
  3. retardances
  4. retardancies
  5. retardancy
  6. retardant
  7. retardants
  8. retardataire
  9. retardate
  10. retardates
  11. retardation

Source and license

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