Word.ws English Dictionary

subanimate

subanimate adjective: below the level of life or animacy; less than alive.

Adjective

subanimate (not comparable)

  1. Below the level of life or animacy; less than alive.
    • There were far-off, indistinct echoes of life, and subanimate mutterings, the slow respirations of the rocks, drinking air and oozing moisture through their sluggish pores, swelling and pushing against their straitening bonds of timber.1883, Mary Hallock Foote, The Led-Horse Claim: A Romance of a Mining Camp, page 113
    • […] the vanguard of science may now have left atomistic mechanism behind and abandoned deterministic explanations of even the subanimate world, but general and humane culture are influenced more by the scientific culture of the age of Newton than […]2014, George C. Herndl, The High Design: English Renaissance Tragedy and the Natural Law, page 283

Origin of subanimate

From sub- + animate.

Questions about subanimate

What does subanimate mean?
Subanimate means below the level of life or animacy; less than alive.
What part of speech is subanimate?
Subanimate is an adjective.

Words near subanimate in the dictionary

  1. subangstrom
  2. subangular
  3. subangularly
  4. subangulate
  5. subangulated
  6. subanimate
  7. subannual
  8. subannually
  9. subanorectic
  10. subantarctic
  11. subantennal

Source and license

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