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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
heterosexual
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
heterosexual (=attracted to the opposite sex)
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
couple
▪ What indeed are the repercussions of establishing the two-parent, heterosexual couple as the only legitimate model of parenthood?
man
▪ In addition, it is an unfortunate fact that some gay men are paedophiles, however few in comparison with heterosexual men.
▪ Until 1989, most cases where white gay men, but the majority are now black heterosexual men.
relationship
▪ Gummer calls for the reassertion of the importance and centrality of the religiously sanctioned, monogamous heterosexual relationship to our culture.
▪ From the safety of my heterosexual relationship I wore my Gaysoc badge out on the streets.
woman
▪ Our national women youth workers' conferences were widely successful with heterosexual women.
▪ The fact that I am a heterosexual woman never mattered.
▪ Fat lesbians and fat heterosexual women may experience fat oppression in different ways, but it is present for both.
▪ Yet lesbian subjects may be more different from each other than they are from many heterosexual women.
▪ Many heterosexual women stayed away specifically because there would be out lesbians there.
▪ As in egalitarian feminist psychology, white, middle-class, middle-aged, heterosexual women are the main subjects of woman-centred psychology.
▪ Any time left over was spent on the heterosexism we were experiencing from heterosexual women at the conferences.
Women, even heterosexual women in his family, are given no real voice at all.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Most of the people who come to the club are heterosexual, but we do get a small number of gay men.
▪ The law applies to both heterosexual and homosexual employees.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ And it appears that the aggregate number of partners in heterosexual adultery is quite low.
▪ Despite public perceptions, across the world 7 out of 10 infections are heterosexual.
▪ Feminist psychologists often adopt an implicitly biological standard of heterosexual normality.
▪ Name one heterosexual male theorist who could display such interest in wrestling, washing powders and Greta Garbo.
▪ Our national women youth workers' conferences were widely successful with heterosexual women.
▪ Perhaps there was still a chance; perhaps Ronnie would find she wasn't meant for heterosexual love.
▪ The fact that I am a heterosexual woman never mattered.
▪ They coped by forming close relationships with a heterosexual partner or a group of women.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
heterosexual

1892, in C.G. Craddock's translation of Krafft-Ebbing's "Psychopathia Sexualis," a hybrid; see hetero- + sexual. The noun is recorded from 1920, but not in common use until 1960s. Colloquial shortening hetero is attested from 1933.

Wiktionary
heterosexual

a. sexual attracted to members of the opposite sex. n. A heterosexual person, or other heterosexual organism.

WordNet
heterosexual

adj. sexually attracted to members of the opposite sex [ant: homosexual, bisexual]

heterosexual

n. a heterosexual person; someone having a sexual orientation to persons of the opposite sex [syn: heterosexual person, straight person, straight]

Usage examples of "heterosexual".

And no one had ever suggested that Burgo was anything but heterosexual.

They also show that maladaptive sexual behavior transcends the simplistic division of homosexual and heterosexual.

There were male customers, married heterosexual men, who sometimes dreamed of making love to women who possessed penises, not male penises, but thin, tapering feminized stalks, like the stamens of flowers, clitorises that had elongated tremendously from abundant desire.

In our modern world, where there is so much bibble-babble about sexual preferences, people in general still seem to think that these must lie either in heterosexual capers or in one of the varieties of homosexuality.

In later tests, the researchers also noticed that female macaques appeared to climax about 20 percent of the time during heterosexual encounters, a rather dismal percentage that we can no doubt chalk up to chronic sexual ineptitude on the part of the males.

It has been Truman's complex affliction always to be attracted to upright heterosexuals, rather as E.

Yes, because Vidal has always believed that heterosexuals got that way purely through the conditioning of that powerful middle class.

Because if gays aren’t different, then heterosexuals are different and Republicans have a lot more murders to answer for than Matthew Shepard’s.

We leave him free in all other matters--as he leaves us free to be atheist or Jew, heterosexual or homosexual, John Bircher or Communist.

And in truth Kafka, though heterosexual, charming, and several times engaged, and furthermore professing that "Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come [is] the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all," never did manage to get married.

Both admitted the alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual magnetism.

The 'fax then thanked G'dath warmly in a female voice designed by skilled psychometricians to be most attractive to heterosexual human males.

In fact, a large part of the attraction of an invite to a party at Darren's place was due to the fact his flat-mates were three salivatingly attractive and reputedly enthusiastically heterosexual female arts students (I'd met them when he'd brought them to Gallanach on a day trip the previous year).

LJC: His basic thesis is that the American writer shies away from the presentation of adult heterosexual love, that he tends to sublimate this in a number of forms -- say, in a suppressed homosexuality in Huckleberry Finn.