antiparallel
adjective, noun
antiparallel is an adjective meaning “Describing the orientations of the two strands of DNA” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled A-N-T-I-P-A-R-A-L-L-E-L, and it appears about once in every 15 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).
What does antiparallel mean?
adjective
- 1
Describing the orientations of the two strands of DNA.
- 2
Describing two beta strands comprising a protein's secondary structure that are aligned and hydrogen bonded but where the vectors describing the amino- and carboxy-terminal ends of each strand are oriented 180° relative to one another.
noun
- 1
A line that forms equal angles with two other lines, but in opposite directions.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce antiparallel?
- US
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Recordings: LL-Q1860_(eng)-Flame,_not_lame-antiparallel.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).
Forms of antiparallel
- antiparallels plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is antiparallel?
Antiparallel appears about once in every 15 million words in written English, the 118,441st most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Antiparallel in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese
In the sense parallel of opposite direction:
| Language | Words |
|---|---|
| French | antiparallèle |
| German | antiparallel |
| Portuguese | antiparalelo |
| Spanish | antiparalelo |
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract). Translations are Wiktionary's, by sense; a linked word has its own PlainSpell page.
Where does antiparallel come from?
From anti- + parallel.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).