Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- adjective Of or relating to both sexes.
- adjective Having both male and female reproductive organs; hermaphroditic.
- adjective Botany Denoting a single flower that contains functional staminate and pistillate structures; perfect.
- adjective Of, relating to, or having a sexual orientation to persons of either sex.
- noun A bisexual organism; a hermaphrodite.
- noun A bisexual person.
from The Century Dictionary.
- In ethnology, characterized by an equal social development of both sexes.
- Having the organs of both sexes in one individual; of two sexes; hermaphrodite.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective (Biol.) Of both sexes; hermaphrodite; as a flower with stamens and pistil, or an animal having ovaries and testes.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- adjective sexuality Sexually attracted to members of either sex.
- adjective botany Of
flowers : having bothpollen andseeds . - adjective botany Of
sporophytes : having bothmale andfemale organs. - adjective botany Of
gametophytes : producing botheggs andsperm . - adjective botany Of
fungi : producing both the "female" ascogonium and the "male" antheridium. - adjective rare
Hermaphroditic . - noun A person who is bisexual. Someone who is attracted to both males and females.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adjective having an ambiguous sexual identity
- adjective sexually attracted to both sexes
- noun a person who is sexually attracted to both sexes
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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And while I found her discussions with older feminists like Shulman, who don't and never have used the label bisexual, even though they had had relationships with both men and women, very interesting, the younger women, including Featherstone and DiFranco, seemed to serve only as quotes to back up the assertions Baumgardner makes about herself.
Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics (What if No One's Watching?) 2007
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In order to distinguish these two great types of fertilization we will use the term bisexual for the one and unisexual for the other.
Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation Hugo de Vries 1891
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I am somewhat embarrassed to admit this now, but I think I was afraid to claim the term "bisexual" because it seemed so finite, or too strong of a revealing label, like "gay."
The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com Maria Burnham 2011
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But I don't want to be afraid of the label bisexual anymore.
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But I don't want to be afraid of the label bisexual anymore.
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I think that perhaps the label bisexual means very little to me.
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My mom uses the term bisexual in the worst way-the hetero-friendly way bi being a phase.
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The term bisexual is necessary to distinguish such individuals from trisexuals.
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"The word 'bisexual' nowhere appears in the book."
BBC News - Home 2011
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"The word 'bisexual' nowhere appears in the book."
131500348 commented on the word bisexual
"All great novels, all true novels, are bisexual."
-Milan Kundera
December 15, 2010
tbtabby commented on the word bisexual
"The original Man, the Individual first created, was bi-sexual." -Aids to Reflection, 1824
Coleridge was the first to use the word in print, but not in the same way it's used today. He used it to mean that humans are born with both masculine and feminine characteristics, and "learn" to act masculine or feminine. The word wasn't used to describe someone with attraction to either gender until the 1890s.
March 5, 2018