K-selection

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A theory involving natural selection based on quality. uncountable

Etymology

Coined by the American ecologists Robert H. MacArthur and E. O. Wilson in 1967. The choice of the letter K came from the German Kapazitätsgrenze (“capacity limit”).

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.