Word.ws English Dictionary

scariant

scariant noun: an unconfirmed or unstudied variant or strain of COVID-19 that causes widespread panic.

Noun

scariant (plural scariants)

  1. (informal) An unconfirmed or unstudied variant or strain of COVID-19 that causes widespread panic.
    • Public health officials derided the X-MPLE strain as a "scariant" last night.
    • Initial reactions have been sceptical at best, with prominent experts suggesting the apparent new strain looks more like a “scariant” – an unconfirmed strain causing a global scare – than a variant.2022 January 11, Aude Mazoue, “Covid variant or ‘scariant’? Experts warn a future ‘Deltacron’ is possible”, in France24

Forms of scariant

pluralscariants

Origin of scariant

Blend of scare + variant.

Questions about scariant

What does scariant mean?
Scariant means an unconfirmed or unstudied variant or strain of COVID-19 that causes widespread panic.
What part of speech is scariant?
Scariant is a noun.
What is the plural of scariant?
The plural of scariant is scariants.

Words near scariant in the dictionary

  1. scarfy
  2. Scargill
  3. Scargillian
  4. Scargills
  5. scari
  6. scariant
  7. scariants
  8. scarid
  9. scarids
  10. scarier
  11. scaries

Source and license

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