subanimate en · ADJ
Etymology
From sub- + animate.
Meanings
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(not-comparable) Below the level of life or animacy; less than alive.
There were far-off, indistinct echoes of life, and subanimate mutterings, the slow respirations of the rocks, drinking air and oozing moisture through their sluggish pores, swelling and pushing against their straitening bonds of timber.
1883, Mary Hallock Foote, The Led-Horse Claim: A Romance of a Mining Camp, page 113:[…] the vanguard of science may now have left atomistic mechanism behind and abandoned deterministic explanations of even the subanimate world, but general and humane culture are influenced more by the scientific culture of the age of Newton than […]
2014, George C. Herndl, The High Design: English Renaissance Tragedy and the Natural Law, page 283: