Cortical

How to spell cortical

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce cortical

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does cortical mean?

1. adjectiveRelating to the cortex, the outer layer of an organ, especially the brain.

Cortical in a sentence

• The scan revealed reduced cortical activity in the patient.

• The researchers measured cortical thickness across hundreds of brain images.

Where does cortical come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin cortex, which literally meant the bark of a tree or the rind of a fruit, anything forming a tough outer covering. Anatomists adopted cortex in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to name the outer layer of an organ, most famously the wrinkled grey surface of the brain, picturing it as the brain's bark. The adjective cortical was formed by adding the Latin suffix -alis, meaning 'relating to', to the stem cortic-, and it entered English scientific writing in the early nineteenth century. The same cortex root survives in everyday words such as 'cork', the bark of the cork oak, which shares the literal sense of an outer layer. Because the spelling keeps the Latin 'c' in 'cortic-' before the -al ending, the trap for writers is the soft, unstressed second syllable, where the vowel collapses to a faint schwa.

How the word is built

• cortic- (from Latin cortex: bark, outer layer/rind)
• -al (adjective suffix: relating to)