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Syllable division derived from spelling — this word is not in the pronouncing dictionary, so no phonetic transcription is shown rather than a guessed one.
diatom is a noun meaning "microscopic unicellular marine or freshwater colonial alga having cell walls impregnated with silica". It carries one recorded sense.
microscopic unicellular marine or freshwater colonial alga having cell walls impregnated with silica
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.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for diatom come from Princeton University’s WordNet. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.