Skip to content
ontologydriven
Sign out

Dictionary

Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.

biplicity en · NOUN

Etymology

From Latin bi- (“twice”). Bailey (1736) suggests borrowing from Latin biplicitas, but this is not well attested. Compare duplicity, from Latin duplicare (“double”).

Meanings

  1. (uncountable) The state of being twice folded; reduplication.
    • […]that certain characteristic properties of the bacterial flagellum can be imitated in a wire coil model. These properties are: (1) the arc which is visible frequently at the end of a flagellum (Figs. 10 and 11), and (2) the phenomenon of “biplicity,” that is, the sudden appearance of one-half the usual pitch (Fig. 12). 1964, Robert Day Allen, Noburō Kamiya, Primitive Motile Systems in Cell Biology, page 610:
  2. (uncountable) Doubleness, the state of being double.
    • He who reads them will see that Mr. Darwin by no means minces matters with Lyell[…] There may be a certain biplicity of kindness and courtesy in Mr. Darwin ; but there is no duplicity of his essential manhood and truth. 1894, James Hutchison Stirling, Darwinianism: Workmen and Work, pages 111-12:
    • The integration and differentiation of vital function on the one hand, and the preparation and composition of food-material on the other hand form — as we will become fully aware further on — the two great divisions in the subject-matter of the science of organization, divisions corresponding to the fundamental biplicity of all advanced organization, its animal and its vegetative life. 1878, Edmund Montgomery, “Monera, and the problem of life”, in The Popular Science Monthly, volume XIII, page 680: