Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Linguistics The union in pronunciation of two adjacent vowels into one syllable without forming a diphthong.
- noun Biology The phase of meiosis in some species in which the chromatin contracts into a mass at one side of the nucleus.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In medicine, closure of the pupil; an obliteration of the pupil of the eye, causing a total loss of vision.
- noun In grammar, the combination into one syllable of two vowels that would not form a diphthong.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Med.) An obliteration of the pupil of the eye.
- noun (Gram.) A contraction of two syllables into one; synecphonesis.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun medicine An obliteration of the pupil of the eye.
- noun A
poetic figure of speech in which twoconsecutive vowel sounds in the same word are pronounced as a singlephoneme so that certain words adhere to a particular poeticmeter .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the contraction of chromatin towards one side of the nucleus during the prophase of meiosis
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
[Late Latin synizēsis, from Greek sunizēsis, from sunizein, to collapse : sun-, syn- + hizein, to settle down; see sed- in Indo-European roots.]
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Ancient Greek Συνιζησις, a sitting together.
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Examples
Sorry, no example sentences found.
vanishedone commented on the word synizesis
WordNet overlooks a linguistic sense.
The O.E.D. also notes: 'Path. Closure of the pupil of the eye.'
February 9, 2009