noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   tail autotomy, the defensive technique used by some animals (especially some lizards) of shedding their tail to escape a predator uncountable
2. 2
   a tail autotomy event countable

Etymology

From tail + shedding.

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