Word.ws English Dictionary

subvirial

subvirial adjective: lacking one or more factors (such as mass or temperature) that would lead to interaction between molecules or particles; not quite virial.

Adjective

subvirial (not comparable)

  1. Lacking one or more factors (such as mass or temperature) that would lead to interaction between molecules or particles; not quite virial.
    • The brightest and most massive parts of many molecular cloud complexes appear close to virial equilibrium (Larson 1981), but detailed mapping of complexes shows that in many cases the less massive and filamentary clouds farther from the center of a complex tend to be subvirial : they have too...2012, E. Falgarone, F. Boulanger, G. Duvert, Fragmentation of Molecular Clouds and Star Formation, →ISBN
    • Magnetic fields aligned more parallel in the subvirial cloud and more perpendicular in the denser, marginally bound cloud.2016, Mikhail Klassen, Ralph E. Pudritz, Helen Kirk, “Filamentary flow and magnetic geometry in evolving cluster-forming molecular cloud clumps”, in arXiv

Origin of subvirial

From sub- + virial.

Questions about subvirial

What does subvirial mean?
Subvirial means lacking one or more factors (such as mass or temperature) that would lead to interaction between molecules or particles; not quite virial.
What part of speech is subvirial?
Subvirial is an adjective.

Words near subvirial in the dictionary

  1. subvillage
  2. subvillages
  3. subvillain
  4. subvillains
  5. subviral
  6. subvirial
  7. subvirion
  8. subvirions
  9. subvirus
  10. subviruses
  11. subviscid

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: subvirial (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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