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contravariant

adjective, noun

contravariant is an adjective meaning “Which reverses the order of morphism composition: formally, which associates each morphism f:X→Y to a morphism F(f):F(Y)→F(X)” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled C-O-N-T-R-A-V-A-R-I-A-N-T, and it appears about once in every 25 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does contravariant mean?

adjective

  1. 1

    Which reverses the order of morphism composition: formally, which associates each morphism f:X→Y to a morphism F(f):F(Y)→F(X).

  2. 2

    Using or relating to contravariance.

  3. 3

    Scaling inversely with a change of basis.

noun

  1. 1

    A bihomogeneous polynomial in dual variables of x, y, ... and the coefficients of some homogeneous form in x, y, ... that is invariant under some group of linear transformations.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How do you pronounce contravariant?

  • 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-contravariant.wav, Wikimedia Commons (author and licence on each file's page).

Forms of contravariant

  • contravariants plural

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).

How common is contravariant?

Contravariant appears about once in every 25 million words in written English, the 152,206th 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).

Contravariant in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense which reverses composition:

LanguageWords
Frenchcontravariant
Germankontravariant
Portuguesecontravariante

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 contravariant come from?

From contra- + variant.

Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).