Word.ws English Dictionary

sphingine

sphingine adjective: sphinx-like.

Adjective

sphingine (comparative more sphingine, superlative most sphingine)

  1. (rare) Sphinx-like.
    • For whenever she asked him how much he had written, he regularly answered 'Nothing,' smiling at her meanwhile that courteous and Sphingine smile which Mrs Aldwinkle always found so baffling, so pre-eminently 'queer'.1925, Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves
    • The word I was looking for, I suppose, was "sphingine" – I thought of the baleful prehistoric smile of the Mycenaean women.1974, Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur, Faber & Faber, published 1992, page 109

Noun

sphingine (countable and uncountable, plural sphingines)

  1. The amino alcohol 2-amino-octadecanol CH₃(CH₂)₁₅-CH(NH₂)-CH₂OH related to sphingosine; any related amino alcohol

Forms of sphingine

Adjective
comparativemore sphingine
superlativemost sphingine
Noun
pluralsphingines

Origin of sphingine

From (the stem of) Latin sphinx + -ine.

Questions about sphingine

What does sphingine mean?
Sphingine means sphinx-like.
What part of speech is sphingine?
Sphingine can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near sphingine in the dictionary

  1. sphinganines
  2. sphinges
  3. sphingian
  4. sphingid
  5. sphingids
  6. sphingine
  7. sphingines
  8. sphingobacteria
  9. sphingobacterial
  10. sphingobacterium
  11. sphingofungin

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sphingine (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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