Word.ws English Dictionary

saltationism

saltationism noun: the belief that evolution operates by the sudden development of new species or biological features from one generation to the next.

Noun

saltationism (uncountable)

  1. (evolutionary theory) The belief that evolution operates by the sudden development of new species or biological features from one generation to the next.
    • Gould has misled himself by his own rhetorical emphasis on the purely poetic or literary resemblance between punctuationism, on the one hand, and true saltationism on the other.1986, Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, W. W. Norton & Company, published 2015, →ISBN

Origin of saltationism

From saltation + -ism.

Questions about saltationism

What does saltationism mean?
Saltationism means the belief that evolution operates by the sudden development of new species or biological features from one generation to the next.
What part of speech is saltationism?
Saltationism is a noun.

Words near saltationism in the dictionary

  1. saltating
  2. saltation
  3. saltational
  4. saltationally
  5. saltationary
  6. saltationism
  7. saltationist
  8. saltationists
  9. saltations
  10. saltative
  11. saltativeness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: saltationism (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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