operculum

1. 1.

   a hard flap serving as a cover for (a) the gill slits in fishes or (b) the opening of the shell in certain gastropods when the body is retracted

   Broaderplate

Other forms of operculum

plural

opercula

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 operculum

What does operculum mean?

operculum means "a hard flap serving as a cover for (a) the gill slits in fishes or (b) the opening of the shell in certain gastropods when the body is retracted".

How many syllables are in operculum?

operculum has 4 syllables: o-per-cu-lum. The stress falls on "per".

Is operculum a common word?

operculum 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.