Meatus | Weird Word

The term meatus is a weird one. The plural form is not what you might think if you've never heard it before.

meatus
mee-AYT-us
meatus passage or channel

In anatomy, the term meatus refers to a passageway or opening into (or through) a tube.

Meatus is a noun derived from the Latin verb meare, which means "to pass."

For example, the term external acoustic meatus refers to the tubelike opening in the temporal bone that allows passage of the tubelike canal of the external ear bearing the same name.

There are many examples of meatus throughout the body.

What?! Was that a typo? Did I just mean to state, "examples of meatus throughout the body."? Yes. Yes, I did.

Considering the many nouns in science and medicine that end in -us and are pluralized by changing the -us to -i, one would think that the proper plural form of meatus is meati. Nope.

The term meatus is a weird one, remember? It's proper plural form is either meatus or meatuses.

Why the weirdness?

The plural form meatus comes from the fact that it in Latin, it belongs to the fourth declension class of nouns—and as such, meatus is the proper plural form in Latin.

The plural form meatuses adopts the English form of pluralization, which happens frequently when Latin terms are imported into English.

The combining form of meatus is meato-, as in meatoscope (for looking into the urinary meatus).

Learning Terminology for Beginners

Here's a brief introduction to learning the new terminology of  a medical, clinical, or human science course. As you might guess, learning the terminology of such a course is the necessary first step that leads to understanding of the core concepts.

This is a brief video that I made to help beginning learners understand the terminology of human anatomy and physiology (A&P)—but the principles apply to any use of medical and anatomical terminology.

This introductory presentation explains the basic principle of word parts and how they are combined to produce a term.

What, if anything, is o-log-y?

After having published other blogs for students and teachers of human anatomy and physiology, it occurs to me that one of the biggest struggles is becoming immersed in a whole new terminology.  

Okay, that didn't just occur to me.  What recently came to mind is the idea of producing a blog for the specific issue of learning the language of human science and medicine. 

So here it is!

Looking ahead, I think I'll be covering concepts like these:

• Tricky issues like Latin pluralization
• Pronunciation issues
• How word parts work, including how terms are built and alternate meanings of word parts
• Where the terminology comes from
• Eponyms
• How to use them
• Why avoid them
• Who those people are or were
• Dissecting specific terms to learn more about their meanings
• Tips on using terminology
• Weird terms or usages
• Terminology trivia

Some of my blog posts will be basic and others will be more advanced.

If you teach in the human sciences, you may want to use the more basic posts to help your students by including links to them in your syllabus, course website or learning management system, or discussions and email messages with your students.  The more advanced posts may help you clarify some of the gaps in your own working knowledge of terminology.

If you are a student of the human sciences, both the basic and advanced posts will help you become more deeply immersed in a new language.  That can only help you better understand concepts and how they are explained or communicated to you.

If you have an ideas for topics, requests, tips, or puzzles you'd like help in solving, please contact me!

The title of this blog is o-log-y.  I derived that name from a dissection of the "-ology" phrase appended to many terms that describe fields of study, such as biology (the scientific study of life) and etymology (the linguistic study of word origins).

[o- combining form, -log- words (study of), -y activity]