pinna
Americannoun
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pinnae,
plural
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pinnas
plural
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Botany. one of the primary divisions of a pinnate leaf.
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Zoology.
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a feather, wing, or winglike part.
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a fin or flipper.
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Anatomy. auricle.
noun
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any leaflet of a pinnate compound leaf
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zoology a feather, wing, fin, or similarly shaped part
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another name for auricle
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pinnae
plural
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of pinna
1660–70; < Latin: feather, wing, fin
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The researchers call transients Orcinus rectipinnus, noting that, in Latin, “recti means right or upright, and pinna means fin, feather, or wing, most likely referring to the tall erect dorsal fin of males.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 29, 2024
Without the malleus and incus, sound waves would not be collected by the pinna.
From Textbooks ● Jun. 9, 2022
The leaflet, or pinna, of the glade fern is quite coarse and contrasts strikingly with its wispier neighbor.
From Washington Post ● Jul. 8, 2015
The mastoid portion of the temporal bone, which can be felt as a bump in the skull behind the pinna, also contains air, which ventilates through the middle ear.
From Textbooks ● Jan. 1, 2015
But I guess that if the Latin word for feather had been frindilus instead of pinna, then you probably would have invented the word pen instead.
From "Frindle" by Andrew Clements
Their ear flaps, or pinnae, can independently rotate forward, backward, and sideways to zero in on a sound’s location.
From National Geographic ● Jan. 2, 2024
Researchers have found a new protozoan, Haplosporidium pinnae, in dead and dying mussels.
From Science Magazine ● Nov. 17, 2021
Carella says bacterial infections are having a greater impact than the parasite in Italy as well as Greece and Croatia, noting that H. pinnae was absent when she first described the disease in Italy.
From Science Magazine ● Nov. 17, 2021
Their pinnae are strongly reduced: essentially just being a slim semicircle of tissue concealed by pelage.
From Scientific American ● Jan. 13, 2014
The pinnae move forwards and at the same time sink downwards, whilst the main petiole rises considerably.
From The Power of Movement in Plants by Charles Darwin
When they design to make many pinnas, or spongy lumps of various weights, these are divided from each other by thin beds or layers of earth, which hinder them from uniting.
The seuenth a pinnas called Frisland, of burden about seuenty tuns.
From The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation — Volume 10 Asia, Part III by Richard Hakluyt
I confess, though the possibility of the pearl increasing in size and loveliness was obvious, that the fact that pinnas are subject to ills, chances, and mishaps, was also recognised.
From Tropic Days by E. J. (Edmund James) Banfield
And Cratinus also speaks of the pinna in his Archilochi— She indeed like pinnas and sea oysters.
From The Deipnosophists, or Banquet of the Learned of Athen?us by Athen?us
The eighth a pinnas that had been in the former voiage called the Pidgeon, now the Ouerijssel, of the burden of fifty tuns.
From The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation — Volume 10 Asia, Part III by Richard Hakluyt
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
