Heterozygote

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A diploid individual that has different alleles at one or more genetic loci.
  2. 2
    (genetics) an organism having two different alleles of a particular gene and so giving rise to varying offspring wordnet
  3. 3
    A bacteriophage that has two different copies of its genetic material and so produces two types of offspring.

Etymology

From hetero- + zygote. Coined by English biologists William Bateson and Edith Rebecca Saunders in 1902, in a paper titled "The facts of heredity in the light of Mendel’s discovery".

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