dominance
- 1The position of holding power, authority, or ascendancy over other people or groups.
The team's dominance over its rivals lasted nearly a decade.
She used her dominance within the company to push the new policy through.
Similarcontrol, power, authority, ascendancy, mastery
Oppositesubmission, subordination, subservience
- 2The state of being most powerful, most important, or supreme among others of its kind.
The dominance of English in international science shows no sign of fading.
Throughout the 1990s, the franchise enjoyed near-total dominance at the box office.
Similarsupremacy, preeminence, predominance, ascendancy, primacy
Oppositeinferiority, subordination
Note
A noun built directly from dominant with -ance, used when one side simply outclasses the field. Jon Smith's BBC Sport report has Spurs controlling a half their dominance deserved. Li Huang and James Lambert speak of monolingual dominance when English fills nearly every sign. It measures standing among rivals, whereas the sense of power over others is about control exercised on people.
- 3The degree to which an allele expresses its phenotype when paired with a different allele, ranging from dominant to recessive.
Mendel's pea experiments revealed clear dominance of the tall allele over the short one.
Incomplete dominance produces pink flowers when red and white alleles are both present.
Oppositerecessiveness
Note
Geneticists treat it as a relation between two alleles, not a quality of the organism, so the natural construction is dominance of one allele over another. The scale runs from complete dominance through incomplete dominance and codominance to recessiveness. It says nothing about how common or forceful a trait is. That confusion is easy to make when the everyday 'supremacy' sense is close at hand.
- 4The tendency for one side of the body, or one organ of a pair, to be more developed or more used than the other, as in right-handedness.
Eye dominance determines which eye a marksman relies on when aiming.
The therapist tested the child's hand dominance before starting writing lessons.
Similarpreference, laterality
Note
Physiologists reckon it organ by organ, so the word usually takes a body part in front: hand dominance (handedness), foot dominance (footedness), eye or ocular dominance. Each pairing is assessed on its own terms. Nothing of rank or control survives in this use. The word simply names which side of the body, or which member of a pair, takes the lead.
Practice
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Origin
Formed from "dominant" combined with the suffix "-ance."