telegony means the belief that, in the case of siblings from the same mother but different fathers, the second sibling could inherit characteristics from the father of the first. It carries an Arena rating of 1290, earned across 48 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, telegony ranks #121 of 17,132 for Most Betrayed by Its Sound, #1,051 of 17,151 for The Improbable, #1,655 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words, #1,926 of 17,163 for Funniest Words.
Why “telegony” is a great word
TELEGONY — [Noun] The discredited biological theory that a female’s previous mate can influence the characteristics of offspring subsequently sired by a different male. From the combining form tele- ("far, at a distance") and -gony ("generation, production"), modeled on a German lexical item; coined in English in 1893 in a translation of a German article. Unlike pangenesis, which proposed a general blending of hereditary particles, or maternal impression, a folk belief centered on the mother's psyche, telegony insists on the spectral, lingering influence of a physically absent sire. It is the phantom of a prizewinning stud haunting a mongrel litter, the imagined stain on a bloodline that could not be scrubbed away, and the cold fear that bloodlines are not discrete channels but muddy, merging streams—a dark fairy tale of heredity, born from the anxiety that the past can bleed irrevocably into the future.
Etymology
From tele- + -gony.
noun
- The belief that, in the case of siblings from the same mother but different fathers, the second sibling could inherit characteristics from the father of the first.e.g.“"And that telegony is still sub judice?" "Undoubtedly." "And that the germ plasm is different from the parthenogenetic egg?" "Why, surely!" I cried, and gloried in my own audacity.” — 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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