viripotent

From Latin vir (“man”) + potens (“fit for”).

viripotent (comparative more viripotent, superlative most viripotent)

1. (obsolete) Able to sire children; sexually mature.
   • 1577, Holinshed, Henry II:

     He would not suffer his sonne to marrie hir, being not of ripe yeares nor viripotent or mariable.

   • 1858, Samuel Brown, Lectures on the atomic theory and essays scientific and literary:

     Mesmer attributed all the phenomena of animal magnetism to the efflux and the influx of a subtle fluid conceived of as specifically localised in the magnet, but radiating also from stars and planets, sun and moon, the earth and the sky, and most effectively of all from the bodies of healthy and viripotent men.

   • 1872, The Truth about Love:

     It has only been done in times past to supply a peculiar class of servants devoted to the care of the women of viripotent men — or, as in the middle ages, to supply alto voices for the religious services in the Roman Church.

2. Lusty; virile; full of life and sexual energy.
   • 1822, William Johnson Fox, Witchcraft:

     Of giving potions to make people love or hate as they please, making the strength of youth impotent, and dead bodies viripotent.

   • 1955, Shenandoah, volumes 7-8, page 55:

     All now spent which should have seeded viripotent May.

   • 1964, Gertrude Jobes, James Jobes, Outer space, page 384:

     Have you, aged, settled into lesser lights, or have you retained all your viripotent powers?

   • 1988, Judith Graves Miller, Françoise Sagan, page 124:

     Through their fiction all these writers proclaim the sexual emancipation of women. Their heroines, albeit to a lesser extent than the viripotent Lea of La Bicyclette bleue, experience sexuality as enabling.

   • 1995, Lyon Sprague De Camp, The Ape-man Within, page 121:

     In recent centuries, the austere Jewish sexual code has fallen on hard times in Christendom, because it cuts athwart the passionate desire of the viripotent human male, especially when young but past adolescence,

   • 2004, Jonathan Land, The Spam Letters, page 23:

     "Seventh Heaven" Kathmandu Temple Kiff (tm); a viripotent cannabis alternative for blissful regressions of vexatious depressions.

• “viripotent”, in The Century Dictionary , New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.