ball-and-socket joint

Questions about ball-and-socket joint

What does ball-and-socket joint mean?

ball-and-socket joint means "a freely moving joint in which a sphere on the head of one bone fits into a rounded cavity in the other bone". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

What is another word for ball-and-socket joint?

Close synonyms include spheroid joint, cotyloid joint, enarthrodial joint, enarthrosis, articulatio spheroidea. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is ball-and-socket joint a common word?

ball-and-socket joint is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.