Dysgenic

//dɪsˈd͡ʒɛn.ɪk// adj

adj ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Of or relating to, or causing degeneration or deterioration in offspring.

    "The study not only showed IQ variance between children the same parents, but because the authors had the IQ scores of various parents, it demonstrated that parents with higher IQs tended to have more kids, ruling out the dysgenic fertility theory as a driver of falling IQ scores and highlighting the role of environmental factors instead."

  2. 2
    Of or relating to dysgenics.
Adjective
  1. 1
    pertaining to or causing degeneration in the offspring produced wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
cacogeniccacogenic

Example

More examples

"The study not only showed IQ variance between children the same parents, but because the authors had the IQ scores of various parents, it demonstrated that parents with higher IQs tended to have more kids, ruling out the dysgenic fertility theory as a driver of falling IQ scores and highlighting the role of environmental factors instead."

Etymology

From dys- + -genic, produced from New Latin dys- from Ancient Greek δυσ- (dus-, “bad”) and γένος (génos, “offspring”).

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