assortative mating
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.64 in modern English
23
Scrabble Score
17
Letters
6
Syllables
11
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Between males and females of a species, the mutual attraction or selection, for reproductive purposes, of individuals with similar characteristics.
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "Underlying all distributions of characters in assortative matings are certain elementary principles based on probabilities and the theory of sampling."
- "A recent New York Times Magazine story that investigated the rise of diagnoses of bipolar disorder in children suggested assortative mating as a possible cause, because parents who are both bipolar—and who may marry because they are more likely to understand one another's symptoms—are more likely to have bipolar children."
Usage
Inflected Forms
Frequently Paired Words
Synonyms
Antonyms
disassortative mating
negative assortative mating