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PlainSpell

supernatant

adjective, noun

supernatant is an adjective meaning “Lying or floating above a denser fluid, or above a solid sediment or precipitate (which has been separated by crystallisation, centrifugation etc.)” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled S-U-P-E-R-N-A-T-A-N-T, and it appears about once in every 7 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data).

What does supernatant mean?

adjective

  1. 1

    Lying or floating above a denser fluid, or above a solid sediment or precipitate (which has been separated by crystallisation, centrifugation etc.).

noun

  1. 1

    The liquid that lies above a sediment or precipitate.

  2. 2

    Material that floats on the surface of a liquid.

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

How do you pronounce supernatant?

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

Forms of supernatant

  • supernatants plural

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

How common is supernatant?

Supernatant appears about once in every 7 million words in written English, the 81,375th 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).

Supernatant in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese

In the sense floating on the surface of a liquid:

LanguageWords
Frenchsurnageant
Portugueseflutuando, sobrenadante
Spanishflotante, sobrenadante

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 supernatant come from?

From super- + natant.

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