• Today's Word

Atavism

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AT-uh-viz-um

Definition

(noun) The reappearance of a characteristic or trait from a distant ancestor that has been absent for several generations; a reversion to an earlier type

Example

The scientist described the child’s unusually dense bone structure as a possible atavism, a trait that hadn’t appeared in the family line for generations.

Word Origin

Atavism comes from the Latin atavus, meaning “ancestor” or “great-great-great-grandfather” — from ata (“father”) + avus (“grandfather”). It entered English in the 19th century as a biological and anthropological term, used to describe the sudden reemergence of dormant ancestral traits in an organism after multiple generations of absence.

Fun Fact

Atavism captured the Victorian imagination like few scientific concepts of its era. Criminologists, most notoriously Cesare Lombroso, controversially argued that certain criminals were “atavistic” — biological throwbacks to more primitive human ancestors, identifiable by physical features. While this theory has been thoroughly discredited, the concept of atavism took on a rich second life in literature: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is widely read as an atavism narrative — the idea that something ancient and animalistic lurks just beneath the civilized surface, waiting to resurface.