Citations:supernumerary

English citations of supernumerary

1. Beyond the prescribed or standard amount or number; excess, extra.
   1. (biology, specifically) Of an organ or structure: additional to what is normally present.
      • 1948 August, Aldous Huxley, “The Script”, in Ape and Essence, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, publishers, →OCLC; republished as Ape and Essence: A Novel, London: Chatto & Windus, 1949, →OCLC, page 74:

        The Camera pulls back for a longer shot. Forty or fifty women, half of them with shaven heads, are sitting on the stairs, among the refuse on the floor, on the tattered remains of ancient beds and sofas. Each of them is nursing a baby, all the babies are ten weeks old, and all those belonging to shaven mothers are deformed. Over close-ups of little faces with hare lips, little trunks with stumps instead of legs and arms, little hands with clusters of supernumerary fingers, little bodies adorned with a double row of nipples, we hear the voice of the Narrator.