Loading page
Syllable division derived from spelling — this word is not in the pronouncing dictionary, so no phonetic transcription is shown rather than a guessed one.
atavist is a noun meaning "an organism that has the characteristics of a more primitive type of that organism". It carries one recorded sense.
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.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for atavist come from Princeton University’s WordNet. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.