Word.ws English Dictionary

unicate

/ˈjuːnɪkət/

unicate noun: a biological specimen that has no duplicates.

Noun

unicate (plural unicates)

  1. A biological specimen that has no duplicates.
    • Dead inflorescences and infructescences are well worth collecting if no fresh material is available or if fresh material is only sufficient for a unicate or one duplicate.1986, John Dransfield, “A guide to collecting palms”, in Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden, volume 73, number 1, page 167
    • Each collection, which may be a unicate or several specimens as duplicates in several herbaria, constitutes a record in the Conifer Database.2013, Aljos Farjon, Denis Filer, An Atlas of the World's Conifers: An Analysis of their Distribution, Biogeography, Diversity and Conservation Status, Koninklijke Brill, →ISBN, page 3
  2. A species that occurs at only a single geographical site.
    • Our data perhaps are more robust for analyzing patterns of endemism because some nuclei for which we have few inventories show high numbers of unicates (e.g., Caribbean, Mexico), and others for which we have sampled far more thoroughly show low numbers (e.g., Brejo and Peri-Caatinga). Though the...2011, Reynaldo Linares-Palomino, Ary T. Oliveira-Filho, R. Toby Pennington, “Neotropical Seasonally Dry Forests: Diversity, Endemism, and Biogeography of Woody Plants”, in Rodolfo Dirzo, Hillary S....

Forms of unicate

pluralunicates

Origin of unicate

Back-formation from duplicate.

Questions about unicate

What does unicate mean?
Unicate means a biological specimen that has no duplicates.
What part of speech is unicate?
Unicate is a noun.
How do you pronounce unicate?
Unicate is pronounced /ˈjuːnɪkət/.
What is the plural of unicate?
The plural of unicate is unicates.

Words near unicate in the dictionary

  1. unicast
  2. unicasted
  3. unicasting
  4. unicastings
  5. unicasts
  6. unicate
  7. unicates
  8. uniced
  9. UNICEF
  10. unicell
  11. unicellate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unicate (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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