breastbone

Other forms of breastbone

plural

breastbones·

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.

Questions about breastbone

What does breastbone mean?

breastbone means "the flat bone that articulates with the clavicles and the first seven pairs of ribs".

How many syllables are in breastbone?

breastbone has 3 syllables: bre-ast-bone. The stress falls on "bre".

What is another word for breastbone?

Close synonyms include sternum. 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 breastbone a common word?

breastbone 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.