Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Alternation of sexual and parthenogenic generations, as in some aphids.
  • noun The state of having different types of flowers on the same plant, as both pistillate ray florets and staminate disk florets in a flower head.
  • noun Marriage between people who are different from each other, especially in their sociocultural backgrounds.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In biology, heterogenesis, or alternation of generations, considered as an alternation between sexual and asexual reproduction or between parthenogenesis and bisexual reproduction.
  • noun Marriage or mating or pairing between unlike individuals, as contrasted with homogamy, or the mating of like with like.
  • noun The state or quality of being heterogamous; mediate or indirect fertilization of plants. See extract under Chermes.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Bot.) The process of fertilization in plants by an indirect or circuitous method; -- opposed to orthogamy.
  • noun (Biol.) That form of alternate generation in which two kinds of sexual generation, or a sexual and a parthenogenetic generation, alternate; -- in distinction from metagenesis, where sexual and asexual generations alternate.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun biology The state of conjugating gametes that are different in size, structure and function
  • noun sociology Marriage or similar union between people of different sexes, or social strata, such as races,.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

hetero- + -gamy

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