Word.ws English Dictionary

tergiant

tergiant adjective: showing its back, having its back turned to the viewer.

tergiant: showing its back, having its back turned to the viewer
Image: Christie L. Ward, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Adjective

tergiant (not comparable)

  1. Showing its back, having its back turned to the viewer.
    • Tortoise [:] this animal is usually borne displayed tergiant in fesse, which position is sometimes described as passant. The term gradient seems to be used to mean the same, and tergiant seems to be implied though not expressed.1894, Henry Gough, James Parker, A Glossary of Terms Used in Heraldry, page 578
    • For quotations using this term, see Citations:tergiant.

Synonyms of tergiant

Origin of tergiant

Ultimately from Latin tergum.

Questions about tergiant

What does tergiant mean?
Tergiant means showing its back, having its back turned to the viewer.
What part of speech is tergiant?
Tergiant is an adjective.

Words near tergiant in the dictionary

  1. tergeminal
  2. tergeminate
  3. tergeminin
  4. tergeminous
  5. tergether
  6. tergiant
  7. tergipedid
  8. tergipedids
  9. tergite
  10. tergites
  11. tergitic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tergiant (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “tergiant.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tergiant. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.