Ectomorph
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 Someone with a lean, only slightly muscular body
"Also there was a woman I hadn't met, a chain-smoking French ectomorph whose job it was to make sense of records of public spending in the Ministry of Finance."
- 2 a person with a thin body wordnet
- 3 Theoretical body type in which a person has a high metabolism. Such a person can easily maintain a low fat physique, but does not add muscle or body weight easily.
"The ectomorph body type is characterized by narrow shoulders and hips and a lean build. Its naturally fast metabolism makes it easy for ectomorphs to lose or maintain body fat levels but more difficult to build muscle."
Example
More examples"Also there was a woman I hadn't met, a chain-smoking French ectomorph whose job it was to make sense of records of public spending in the Ministry of Finance."
Etymology
Derived from ectoderm + -morph from William Herbert Sheldon. Equivalent to ecto- + -morph.
More for "ectomorph"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.