adjuvant

1. 1.

   furnishing added support

   “an ancillary pump”

   “an adjuvant discipline to forms of mysticism”

   “The mind and emotions are auxiliary to each other”

   Synonymsaccessoryadjunctancillaryappurtenantauxiliary

   Similarsupportive
2. 2.

   enhancing the action of a medical treatment

   “the adjuvant action of certain bacteria”

   Similarhelpful

   pharmacology

1. 1.

   an additive that enhances the effectiveness of medical treatment

   Broaderadditive

Other forms of adjuvant

plural

adjuvants·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about adjuvant

What does adjuvant mean?

adjuvant means "furnishing added support". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in adjuvant?

adjuvant has 3 syllables: ad-ju-vant. The stress falls on "ad".

What is another word for adjuvant?

Close synonyms include accessory, adjunct, ancillary, appurtenant, auxiliary. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is adjuvant a common word?

adjuvant is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.