[
UK
/həmˈʌnkjʊləs/
]
NOUN
- a tiny fully formed individual that (according to the discredited theory of preformation) is supposed to be present in the sperm cell
- a person who is very small but who is not otherwise deformed or abnormal
How To Use homunculus In A Sentence
- We've moved from imagining a little homunculus lurking in the sperm to one hiding in the genome.
- There is no graphical representation - nothing like the tiny homunculus curled up in the head of a sperm which some of the earlier microscopists imagined they could see.
- York that the future bride of the famous homunculus is Miss Lavinia Warren, twenty-one inches high, and granddaughter of General Warren, who was killed at the battle of Bunker's Hill. General Tom Thumb
- Yet other preformationists believed that the sperm contained the embryo and some even claimed to be able to see a tiny human - a homunculus - in the head of each human sperm.
- He is a homunculus in the grip of a theatrical power greater than himself. Times, Sunday Times
- In the caricatured version, preformationism has usually been ridiculed as the belief that a perfect homunculus lies within each sperm or egg cell.
- Even if skin color were taken as a signifier for race, a metonym for some racial homunculus, all it would prove is a trope, not an index.
- Had Victor not abandoned his original mentors, necromancers like Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, and Albertus Magnus, he might have created a harmless homunculus instead of the creature, who exacts revenge upon him.
- Yesterday afternoon I answered the doorbell and came face to face with an evil homunculus.
- 'homunculus' -- in the conviction, as he asserted, that 'in course of time chemistry is bound to succeed in producing organic bodies and in creating a human being by means of crystallization' -- an assertion not very different from that of a still more trustworthy scientist, for The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust'