Word.ws English Dictionary

revertent

/ɹɪˈvɜː(ɹ)tənt/

revertent adjective: having reverted to a previous (more basic or more natural) state.

Adjective

revertent

  1. Having reverted to a previous (more basic or more natural) state.
    • As can be seen from the data for the control cultures, the variability in the numbers of revertent colonies observed in the absence of any specific mutant can be quite large.1979, R. N. Dexter, S. P. Pavlou, Richard M. Kocan, Mutagenicity of Puget Sound Sediment Extracts, page 8
    • The revertent virus may have escaped immune recognition in the animal in which it arose, but this virus was pathogenic in naive hosts.1999, R. Ahmed, Irvin Chen, Persistent Viral Infections, page 337

Noun

revertent (plural revertents)

  1. (obsolete) A remedy which restores the natural order of the inverted irritative motions in the animal system
  2. (broadly) Any remedy that restores something to its desired natural state.
    • Dear Rowland, it must be your business and mine to experimentalize on the utility and practicability of a revertent to this disgusting disorder which now vexes and threatens death to the state.1848, Thomas Hall, Rowland Bradshaw, page 295
  3. A mutation that reverts or undoes the effects of another mutation.
    • A revertent having restored levels of ornithine decarboxylase has been reported () and is probably a second site revertent which compensates for ts4.1982, Advances in Genetics- Volume 21, page 360
    • In all cases where the original inactivating mutation disrupted a base pair in the putative secondary structure of the site, in the revertent, the opposing nucleotide in the base pair mutated to restore pairing.1999, Progress in Nucleic Acid Research and Molecular Biology, page 44

Forms of revertent

pluralrevertents

Origin of revertent

Borrowed from French revertent, from Latin revertor, equivalent to revert + -ent.

Questions about revertent

What does revertent mean?
Revertent means having reverted to a previous (more basic or more natural) state.
What part of speech is revertent?
Revertent can be an adjective or a noun.
How do you pronounce revertent?
Revertent is pronounced /ɹɪˈvɜː(ɹ)tənt/.

Words near revertent in the dictionary

  1. revertases
  2. reverted
  3. reverted back
  4. revertee
  5. revertees
  6. revertent
  7. revertents
  8. reverter
  9. reverters
  10. reverteth
  11. revertibility

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: revertent (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “revertent.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/revertent. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.