adjuvant
/ˈæd͡ʒəv(ə)nt/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 2.58 in modern English
19
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
3
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
Enhancing the immune response to an antigen; also, containing a substance having such an effect.
adj
Of a form of therapy or treatment: additional, supplementary; specifically (oncology), of a cancer treatment: given after removal of a primary tumour.
noun
Someone or (more commonly) something that assists, facilitates, or helps; an aid, an assistant, a helper.
Formal
noun
Someone or (more commonly) something that assists, facilitates, or helps; an aid, an assistant, a helper.
Formal
Example Sentences
- "Adjuvant chemotherapy, [Paul] Carbone conjectured, could be the surgeon's little helper. It would eradicate microscopic deposits of cancer left behind after surgery, thus extirpating any remnant reservoirs of malignancy in the body in early breast cancer— […]"
- "The well-known tropic action of immune serum as an adjuvant to phagocytosis suggested early in our studies that we might here be dealing with a similar phenomenon."
Etymology
Learned borrowing from Latin adiuvant-, adjuvant- + English -ant (suffix forming adjectives with the sense ‘exhibiting a condition or process’; and forming agent nouns). Adiuvant-, adjuvant- are oblique stems of adiuvāns, adjuvāns (“assisting, helping”), the present active participle of adiuvō (“to assist, help; to be useful; etc.”), from ad- (“prefix meaning ‘to; toward’”) + iuvō (“to aid, help; to save”) (possibly from Proto-Indo-European *h₁ewH- (“to assist, help; to save”)). Adjective sense 3 (“of a form of therapy or treatment: additional, supplementary”) and noun sense 1.4 (“additive which aids or modifies the action of the principal ingredient of a drug”) are possibly derived from French adjuvant (adjective, noun).
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: *h₁ewH-, adjuvant
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈæd͡ʒəv(ə)nt/
- British English: /ˈæd͡ʒʊv(ə)nt/