Meaning & use
-valent
Added to a number to describe how many chemical bonds an atom or group can form, as in trivalent.
See it in a sentence
Carbon is described as tetravalent because each atom can form four chemical bonds.
A polyvalent vaccine protects against several different strains of a virus at once.
A note on using this word
This suffix is almost never used alone; it always attaches to a prefix such as mono-, di-, tri-, or poly-.
Words with a similar meaning
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