Acetabula

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A small cup-like structure or socket in anatomy, particularly where a bone fits into a joint
2. a term in botany referring to a shallow cavity or receptacle in certain fruits
3. in archaeology, it denotes the circular pits used for housing purposes or storage in ancient structures

Etymology: "Acetabula" is the plural of "acetabulum," and the Latin original was a small dish for vinegar. The Romans used "acētābulum" for a saucer-shaped vessel and also as a unit of measure, roughly a forty-eighth of a congius, a liquid measure. It was built from "acētum," meaning vinegar, and "-bulum," a suffix denoting a vessel for something, so the word literally meant something like "vinegar-vessel." The leap from kitchen crockery to anatomy came because the hip socket, the cup-shaped cavity that receives the head of the femur, looked like such a dish. English took the Latin word directly as a learned borrowing, so the anatomical sense is the one most readers meet first. In archaeology the plural "acetabula" names the circular pits dug into ancient structures for storage or other domestic use. The term is a modern borrowing of the same Latin form, applied to the pits because of their round, bowl-like shape.

Synonyms: hip sockets, cup-shaped cavities, joint sockets