Coterminous
adj ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Meeting end to end or at the ends. not-comparable
- 2 Having matching boundaries; or, adjoining and sharing a boundary. not-comparable
"New York's borough of Brooklyn and Kings County are coterminous."
- 3 Having the same scope, range of meaning, or extent in time. broadly, not-comparable
"But it is purely fantastic unless we bear in mind that the governing class has been continually compelled to enlarge itself, and that its tendency is reluctantly to go on doing so until in the end it will be coterminous with the "governed class.""
- 4 Said of linked or related property leases that expire together. not-comparable
- 1 being of equal extent or scope or duration wordnet
Example
More examples"By far, most land owned by the federal government is in the American West. The feds own almost 47 percent of the 11 coterminous Western states, which include California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington State, Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah. The U.S. government owns a whopping 85 percent of land in the state of Nevada."
Etymology
From Latin conterminus, from con- (“with”) + terminus (“border, end”), equivalent to co- + terminous. The spelling with co- instead of con- is probably influenced by the related prefix co-.
Related phrases
More for "coterminous"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.