Skip to main content
PlainSpell

xanthophyll

noun

xanthophyll is a noun meaning “Any of various hydroxy, carbonyl or carboxylic acid derivatives of carotenes” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled X-A-N-T-H-O-P-H-Y-L-L, and it appears about once in every 78 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of xanthophyll is xanthophylls.

What does xanthophyll mean?

noun

  1. 1

    Any of various hydroxy, carbonyl or carboxylic acid derivatives of carotenes.

  2. 2

    Lutein.

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

Forms of xanthophyll

  • xanthophylls plural

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

How common is xanthophyll?

Xanthophyll appears about once in every 78 million words in written English, the 279,513th 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).

Where does xanthophyll come from?

From xantho- + -phyll.

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