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Bisexual
Definitions
- 1 Sexually attracted to both opposite-gendered and same-gendered individuals. (Compare pansexual.)
"Skirt Club caters to bisexual or bicurious women. No men are allowed, but women with all levels of experience in same-sex sexuality, from bicurious to fully lesbian, are welcomed."
- 2 Having both male and female parts, characteristics, or functions.; Of flowers: having both pollen and seeds.
- 3 Having both male and female parts, characteristics, or functions.; Of sporophytes: having both male and female organs.
- 4 Having both male and female parts, characteristics, or functions.; Of gametophytes: producing both eggs and sperm.
- 5 Having both male and female parts, characteristics, or functions.; Of fungi: producing both the "female" ascogonium and the "male" antheridium.
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- 6 Having both male and female parts, characteristics, or functions.; Hermaphroditic/intersex, being both male and female, or alternating between being male and being female. rare
"Midrash and Zohar present Adam as hermaphroditic or bisexual."
- 7 Having both male and female parts, characteristics, or functions.; Androgynous.
"The bisexual name, such as Marion and Carol (and Evelyn and Vivian in England), is frequently a source of annoyance and embarrassment to the letter writer, who, if he does not know his ambiguously named correspondent personally […]"
- 8 Having two distinct sexes, male and female (as contrasted with unisexual or hermaphroditic).
"It is probable, therefore, that hermaphroditism must be regarded as a variation from an earlier condition in which the sexes were separate, and that the hermaphrodites which occasionally appear in normally bisexual species are produced by variations occurring sporadically in the same direction."
- 9 Involving two sexes (particularly with regard to reproduction; contrast parthenogenetic or asexual).
"[…] where the parthenogenetic and bisexual generations do not differ in any character except their manner of reproduction[…]"
- 1 sexually attracted to both sexes wordnet
- 2 having an ambiguous sexual identity wordnet
- 1 A person who is bisexual.
"Several chapters are devoted to the investigations of the origins and influences prevalent in the life of a bisexual with the latter portion of the book devoted to three extensive in-depth interviews with three bisexuals."
- 2 a person who is sexually attracted to both sexes wordnet
- 3 A plant or fungus, or part thereof, which is bisexual. rare
- 4 An organism (that is, a species) which has male and female sexes.
"The direct way to solve this dilemma is to study the inheritance of some specific features of genomic DNA of bisexual species by the genome of unisexual species . It seems possible to study this if the recent bisexuals resemble their ancestral […]"
Etymology
From bi- + -sexual, via the French bisexuel (bi-, sexuel). Attested since 1792 as a synonym in botany for "hermaphroditic" ("having male and female parts"). First used of sexuality in Richard von Krafft-Ebing's 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis (in German) and Charles Gilbert Chaddock's 1892 English translation thereof, due to the theory that people were naturally attracted to the opposite sex and so the brain or mind of a person attracted to "both" sexes (or to the same sex) must be partly of another sex and thus "hermaphroditic".
From bi- + -sexual, via the French bisexuel (bi-, sexuel). Attested since 1792 as a synonym in botany for "hermaphroditic" ("having male and female parts"). First used of sexuality in Richard von Krafft-Ebing's 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis (in German) and Charles Gilbert Chaddock's 1892 English translation thereof, due to the theory that people were naturally attracted to the opposite sex and so the brain or mind of a person attracted to "both" sexes (or to the same sex) must be partly of another sex and thus "hermaphroditic".
See also for "bisexual"
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