chiral
Americanadjective
Other Word Forms
- chirality noun
Etymology
Origin of chiral
1894; chir- < Greek cheír hand + -al 1; coined by Lord Kelvin
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Nitta and Minoru Eto of Hiroshima University's WPI-SKCM2, a research center focused on knotted and chiral phenomena across different systems and scales, together with Yu Hamada of the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Germany, argue that a plausible solution might be hiding in a well-motivated extension of known physics.
From Science Daily
Many medicines are chiral, meaning they exist in two mirror-image forms -- similar to a pair of hands -- that can behave differently inside the body.
From Science Daily
Your hands are chiral body parts, because when placed over one another, they line up perfectly yet are shaped reflectively.
From Salon
Effectively, and functionally, a molecule and its chiral mirror image are two different molecules.
From Salon
The mirror protease only works on mirror peptides, which means, by the law of mirror-image symmetry that applies to chiral molecules, that regular proteases would likewise be unable to cut down mirror-image peptides.
From Salon
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
