Holotype

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The single physical example (or illustration) of an organism used to formally describe the species (or lower-order taxon), subsequently to be kept as a reference.

    "The holotype of this species is subglobular in shape and ammoniticonic in its mode of growth."

  2. 2
    the original specimen from which the description of a new species is made wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
type specimentype specimen

Example

More examples

"The holotype of this species is subglobular in shape and ammoniticonic in its mode of growth."

Etymology

From holo- + -type.

Related phrases

conserved typetype species

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