cautery

Other forms of cautery

plural

cauteries·

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 cautery

What does cautery mean?

cautery means "an instrument or substance used to destroy tissue for medical reasons (eg removal of a wart) by burning it with a hot iron or an electric current or a caustic or by freezing it". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in cautery?

cautery has 3 syllables: cau-te-ry. The stress falls on "cau".

What is another word for cautery?

Close synonyms include cauterant, cauterization, cauterisation. 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 cautery a common word?

cautery 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.