predominate

You should make sure that you understand the difference between “dominate” and "predominate" as this is crucial to understand the differences between the following words: dominance and predominance and dominant and predominant later.

To help you, we have summarized the differences for you here. As a rule of thumb, you should use dominate when you want to express the meaning of “control or power” and when you have an object. You should use predominate when you refer to something being the most common or being widespread in a certain area. Use dominate when you speak about the influence of sth. and predominate when you talk about numbers.

You may encounter the word "dominate" in your history or politics class as well. Like in the following textbook sample:

As said before, dominate can mean 'to be the most common” as well' This usage appears quite often in TOEFL academic lectures or passages. So, let's look at some TOEFL academic style example sentences:

The word predominate is sometimes used with the preposition “over”. So when “A predominates over B” means “A is more common than B”. Let's look at the following examples:

Okay! Since here the meaning of dominate is “to be the most common”, we can actually use predominate to convey the same meaning. For instance, we could say “Invertebrates predominate in deep sea regions.” instead of “invertebrates dominate deep sea regions.” I will explain why we have to use "in” here in a bit.

Remember we cannot always replace dominate with predominate. Take this sentence here for example: "Our company dominates the market for operating systems." Here dominate means have power and influence over the market. If we use the verb predominate, the sentence becomes "Our company predominates in the market for operating systems. (! awkward )". That's not completely wrong, but native speakers wouldn't normally write or say it like that. This is because “predominate” is not often used in the sense of “control or rule sth” while dominate is. Let me give you a better example using predominate:

Okay! There is another difference between dominate and predominate. The verb “predominate” is an intransitive verb, meaning it doesn't take an object, whereas dominate is a transitive verb, meaning it does take objects. This is why we used “in” with predominate before. Let's look at the following example sentence using “dominate”

"Dominate" and "predominate" can be used interchangeably in some sentences, normally dominate is used to mean “to have or exert power or influence over sth./sb.” "Predominate" on the other hand is mostly used as “to be the most common”. However, "dominate" can mean “to be the most common” as well and this is where it gets confusing. But more on this later. Let's talk about dominate in the sense of “to rule or control sth.” first.

Dominate here is almost always used as with an object. We often see it used in business and sports. Let's have a look at some examples:

As you can see, the verb “dominates” takes the object, which is “Mars' atmosphere. We can change this sentence using predominate because dominate here means being the most common. But we cannot simply exchange the two words. We have to write it like this:

So we have to use the preposition “in” here, since “predominate” doesn't take a direct object.

Okay! Let's look at more example sentences of the verb “predominate” where the same applies: :