Definition of "instar"

In A. orientalis, first and second instars were more susceptible than third instars to H. bacteriophora TF strain, […]

2005, Nematodes as biocontrol agents, edited by Parwinder S. Grewal, Ralf-Udo Ehlers, and David I. Shapiro-Ilan, (Please provide the book title or journal name), page 133

We avoided Tourist Homes, country cousins of Funeral ones, old-fashioned, genteel and showerless, with elaborate dressing tables in depressingly white-and-pink little bedrooms, and photographs of the landlady’s children in all their instars.

1955, Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: G[eorge] P[almer] Putnam’s Sons, published August 1958, part 2, page 148

California spirituality is a late instar of America’s utopian impulse, and corporate meritocracy derives from the Whig dream of the self-made man that entranced young Abraham Lincoln.

2014 January 8, Caleb Crain, “The Democratic Personality”, in The New Yorker‎

Yet mark with shining steps the humbler way;And, as angelic feet instar the sky,Drop the bright sparks along the wilderness.

1882, Frederick Randolph Abbe, The Temple Rebuilt: A Poem, page 125

Espey could distinguish through the clear darkness the fringed branches of a pine-tree clinging to the heights above and waving against the instarred sky, and below a vague moving whiteness […]

1893, The Atlantic Monthly, volume 72, page 507

He was dreaming, surely; or were those deep, instarred eyes really fixed upon him with that wistful gaze which he had seen only twice before?

1896, Mary Noailles Murfree (pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock), In the Tennessee mountains, 14th edition, page 209