pinna
Americannoun
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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
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, the vibrations of the pinna would not be able to reach the stapes and then be sent to the cochlea.
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
“And after all, didn’t somebody just make up the word pinna, too?”
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
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
Researchers have found a new protozoan, Haplosporidium pinnae, in dead and dying mussels.
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
Even the pinnae, or leaflets, were each over a yard long.
From The Plant Hunters Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains by Reid, Mayne
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 Banfield, E. J. (Edmund James)
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 Hakluyt, Richard
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 Hakluyt, Richard
The weight of these pinnas may be increased nearly a third, by dipping them while red hot into water.
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.
