ATAVISM

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does atavism mean? 

• ATAVISM (noun)
  The noun ATAVISM has 1 sense:

1. a reappearance of an earlier characteristic

  Familiarity information: ATAVISM used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ATAVISM (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A reappearance of an earlier characteristic

Classified under:

Nouns denoting natural events

Synonyms:

atavism; reversion; throwback

Hypernyms ("atavism" is a kind of...):

recurrence; return (happening again (especially at regular intervals))

Derivation:

atavist (an organism that has the characteristics of a more primitive type of that organism)

 Context examples 

He was a magnificent atavism, a man so purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the world before the development of the moral nature.

(The Sea-Wolf, by Jack London)

It was after tea on a summer evening, and the conversation, which had roamed in a desultory, spasmodic fashion from golf clubs to the causes of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic, came round at last to the question of atavism and hereditary aptitudes.

(The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)