Borrowed from Latin femur (“thigh”).
femur (plural femurs or femora)
- (anatomy) A thighbone.
- (entomology) The middle segment of the leg of an insect, between the trochanter and the tibia.
- (arachnology) A segment of the leg of an arachnid.
Translations to be checked
Uncertain. The heteroclitic (r/n) inflection is rather archaic (as also seen in iecur and iter), descending from Proto-Indo-European *-r̥ ~ *-n-, but no secure Proto-Indo-European origin for femur can be found. De Vaan and Lubotsky tentatively support Steinbauer's derivation from Proto-Indo-European *dʰénwr̥ (“arc, bow”); this is semantically attractive, but the hypothetical change from *-nw- to *-(n)m- from Proto-Indo-European to Latin is strange.[1][2]
femur n (genitive feminis or femoris); third declension
- thigh
- thighbone
- (architecture) the space between the grooves of a triglyph
- (figuratively) the loins; capacity to produce children.
Third-declension noun (neuter, imparisyllabic non-i-stem; two different stems).
- ^ De Vaan, Michiel (2008) “femur, -inis”, in Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 7), Leiden, Boston: Brill, →ISBN, page 210
- ^ Lubotsky, Alexander (2011) “dhánus-”, in The Indo-Aryan Inherited Lexicon (in progress) (Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Project), Leiden University, pages 161-2
See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.
fēmur
- first-person plural present active subjunctive of for
- “femur”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
- “femur”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
- femur in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
- femur in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.
Borrowed from French fémur.
femur n (plural femururi)
- femur