Heterozygous

adj

adj ·5 syllables ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Of an organism: having two different alleles in a given gene. not-comparable

    "Plant breeding is always a numbers game.[…]The wild species we use are rich in genetic variation, and individual plants are highly heterozygous and do not breed true. In addition, we are looking for rare alleles, so the more plants we try, the better."

Adjective
  1. 1
    having dissimilar alleles at corresponding chromosomal loci wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
simplex

Example

More examples

"Plant breeding is always a numbers game.[…]The wild species we use are rich in genetic variation, and individual plants are highly heterozygous and do not breed true. In addition, we are looking for rare alleles, so the more plants we try, the better."

Etymology

From hetero- + -zygous.

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