Abdomen

How to spell abdomen

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce abdomen

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does abdomen mean?

1. nounThe part of the body between the chest and the pelvis, containing the stomach and other digestive organs.
2. nounThe rear section of the body of an insect or other arthropod, behind the thorax.

Abdomen in a sentence

• The surgeon made a small incision in the patient's abdomen.

• The wasp's bright yellow abdomen warns predators to stay away.

• A sharp pain in the lower abdomen sent her to the doctor.

• In this beetle the abdomen is tucked beneath hardened wing cases.

Where does abdomen come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes straight from the Latin abdomen, which simply meant 'the belly' or 'the paunch'. Roman writers themselves were unsure of its deeper origin, and modern scholars remain divided: one popular suggestion links it to the verb abdere, meaning 'to hide away' or 'conceal', on the idea that the belly is where food is hidden after eating. English took the word over in the sixteenth century, first as a learned anatomical term among physicians, and it has kept its tidy Latin spelling ever since. Because it arrived as a technical word rather than through everyday speech, it never softened into a more 'English' shape, which is why the unstressed middle vowel stays an easily mistyped 'o' (abdOmen, not abdAmen). The same belly-region sense later extended in zoology to the rear segment of an insect's body, the part that often holds the digestive and reproductive organs.

How the word is built

• abdomen (Latin: belly), perhaps ab- (away)
• a root linked to abdere 'to hide, conceal'