Kotyle

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. a shallow drinking cup or anatomical socket-like receptacle found in ancient Greek contexts or biological structures
2. an ancient Greek goblet or bone cavity resembling a cup in form and function
3. A shallow vessel used in ancient Greece for drinking or holding liquids ; a concave anatomical depression that serves as a socket for a bone or organ

Etymology: The Greek "kotylē" originally meant a measure of volume, roughly a half-pint, before it came to name the cup or small vessel that held that amount. That everyday container gave the word its first sense in Greek, and the same unit-to-vessel shift shows up across many ancient measure words. The anatomical sense is a later extension of that sense of cupped hollowness. A cup has a rounded inner surface, and the same shape appears in the body wherever a bone's rounded end sits snugly into a matching depression. The hip joint, where the head of the thighbone fits into a cup-shaped socket in the pelvis, is the best-known example, and anatomists borrowed the old word to name that cavity. English took the word from Greek in its own right, so it is a doublet of "cotyla," "cotyle," and "kotylos," which were all Greek-derived forms that entered the language along slightly different routes. Each one preserves a different stage of the same ancient word.