Word.ws English Dictionary

sphenodon

sphenodon noun: the tuatara.

Noun

sphenodon (plural sphenodons)

  1. The tuatara.
    • In New Zealand the dinosaurs had perished 65 million years before, as they had elsewhere on the globe; but the sphenodons or tuataras who had been their contemporaries from Jurassic times persisted, in New Zealand but nowhere else, for reasons that remain obscure.2003, Michael King, The Penguin History of Aotearoa New Zealand, Penguin, published 2023, page 4
  2. Any of the other extinct reptiles of the Sphenodontidae family.

Forms of sphenodon

pluralsphenodons

Origin of sphenodon

From the genus name Sphenodon.

Questions about sphenodon

What does sphenodon mean?
Sphenodon means the tuatara.
What part of speech is sphenodon?
Sphenodon is a noun.
What is the plural of sphenodon?
The plural of sphenodon is sphenodons.

Words near sphenodon in the dictionary

  1. sphenoccipital
  2. sphenocephalic
  3. sphenocephaly
  4. sphenochasm
  5. sphenocorona
  6. sphenodon
  7. sphenodons
  8. sphenodont
  9. sphenodontian
  10. sphenodontians
  11. sphenodontid

Source and license

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