Falange

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Any of the small bones that make up the fingers or toes in humans and other vertebrates
2. One of the tubular bones forming the skeletal structure of the digits in the hand or foot
3. A bone segment in the fingers or toes that connects at joints to adjacent bones

Etymology: The Spanish word "falange" is the source of the English term, and its most striking feature is how far its political sense has traveled from the military formation it originally named. The underlying Greek "phálanx" described a dense block of heavily armed infantry, shields locked side by side, and the same word passed into Latin as "phalanx" and then into Spanish as "falange," which carried the same military meaning of a tightly packed body of troops. In twentieth-century Spain, "Falange" became the name of a political movement, most famously the Falange Española founded in 1933 and later merged into the Franco regime. The choice of name was deliberate: a phalanx stood for disciplined, unified collective action, and the movement used the image to present itself as a cohesive body rather than a loose party. English borrowed the political sense from Spanish, so the word now usually refers to that movement, though it still shares its ancestry with the Greek military term.

Synonyms: phalanx, bone