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Syllable division derived from spelling — this word is not in the pronouncing dictionary, so no phonetic transcription is shown rather than a guessed one.
autotomy is a noun meaning "spontaneous removal or casting off of a body part (as the tail of a lizard or claw of a lobster) especially when the organism is injured or under attack". It carries one recorded sense.
spontaneous removal or casting off of a body part (as the tail of a lizard or claw of a lobster) especially when the organism is injured or under attack
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for autotomy come from Princeton University’s WordNet. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.