cloaca

1. 1.

   (zoology) the cavity (in birds, reptiles, amphibians, most fish, and monotremes but not mammals) at the end of the digestive tract into which the intestinal, genital, and urinary tracts open

   Broadercavity

   zoology

2. 2.

   a waste pipe that carries away sewage or surface water

   Synonymssewersewerage

   Broaderdrain

   Part ofsewage system

Other forms of cloaca

plural

cloacae

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 cloaca

What does cloaca mean?

cloaca means "(zoology) the cavity (in birds, reptiles, amphibians, most fish, and monotremes but not mammals) at the end of the digestive tract into which the intestinal, genital, and urinary tracts open". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in cloaca?

cloaca has 3 syllables: clo-a-ca. The stress falls on "clo".

What is another word for cloaca?

Close synonyms include sewer, sewerage. 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 cloaca a common word?

cloaca 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.