Meanings
- not comparableBelow 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 1131 more example
[…] 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
Origin
Cite this entry
subanimate. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/subanimate
“subanimate.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/subanimate. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “subanimate,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/subanimate.
Source: subanimate on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.