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Added 10 October 2026

heterozygote

noun

In Latin: none, coined in 1902 Coined: 1902, by Edith Rebecca Saunders Wiktionary

noun Definition from WordNet 3.1, Princeton University. More about heterozygote at Wordnik → Where our words come from →

(genetics) an organism having two different alleles of a particular gene and so giving rise to varying offspring.

Origin

From hetero- + zygote. Coined by English biologists William Bateson and Edith Rebecca Saunders in 1902, in a paper titled "The facts of heredity in the light of Mendel’s discovery".

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