macula

Other forms of macula

plural

maculae

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 macula

What does macula mean?

macula means "a cooler darker spot appearing periodically on the sun's photosphere; associated with a strong magnetic field". That is the primary sense; the word has 3 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in macula?

macula has 3 syllables: ma-cu-la. The stress falls on "ma".

What is another word for macula?

Close synonyms include sunspot, macula lutea, macular area, yellow spot, macule. 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 macula a common word?

macula 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.