cilium

Other forms of cilium

plural

cilia

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 cilium

What does cilium mean?

cilium means "a hairlike projection from the surface of a cell; provides locomotion in free-swimming unicellular organisms". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in cilium?

cilium has 3 syllables and divides as ci-li-um under the regular spelling rules. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for cilium?

Close synonyms include eyelash, lash. 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 cilium a common word?

cilium 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.