osculum

English

Etymology

From Latin ōsculum (“little mouth”).

Noun

osculum (plural oscula)

1. (chiefly zoology) A small opening or orifice. [from 18th c.]
2. (zoology, obsolete) One of the suckers on the head of a tapeworm.
3. (zoology) The main opening in a sponge from which water is expelled.
   • 1857, J. S. Bowerbank, “On the Vital Powers of the Spongiadæ”, in Report of the 26th Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, John Murray, page 444:

     I left them in that condition, and at 7 o'clock examined them again, when I found them still quiescent; but one of the two large groups of oscula and the new one were entirely closed, while the other osculum at the largest end of the sponge had opened to the extent of about one-third of its diameter, and the membrane presented the appearance of a series of lines or corrugations radiating from the centre to the circumference.

   • 2012, Caspar Henderson, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, Granta Books, published 2013, page 29:

     Waste water was expelled through a single osculum at about 8.5 cm per second – more than eight thousand times as fast as it circulated in the chambers and 85 times as fast as it entered the sponge in the first place.

   • 2012, Sally P. Lees, April Hill, The Physiology and Molecular Biology of Sponge Tissues, Mikel A. Becerro, Maria J. Uriz, Manuel Maldonado, Xavier Turon (editors), Michael Lesser (series editor), Advances in Marine Biology 62: Advances in Sponge Science, Elsevier (Academic Press), page 30,

     Oscula are also thought to arise initially from a single porocyte (Weissenfels, 1980), but how they coordinate with other porocytes to form a larger osculum is still unclear.

Derived terms

• osculum infame

Translations

main opening in a sponge

• Finnish: hylkyaukko
• French: oscule (fr) m
• German: Osculum n
• Irish: óisín m
• Italian: osculo (it) m
• Polish: oskulum m
• Portuguese: ósculo (pt) m
• Russian: оскулум m (oskulum)
• Serbo-Croatian:

  Cyrillic: оскулум m

  Roman: oskulum m

• Spanish: ósculo (es) m
• Ukrainian: оскулюм m (oskuljum)

Anagrams

• lucumos, musculo-

Latin

Alternative forms

• ausculum (hypercorrect)

Etymology

From ōs (“mouth”) +‎ -culum (diminutive suffix).

Pronunciation

• (Classical) IPA^(key): /ˈoːs.ku.lum/, [ˈoːs̠kʊɫ̪ʊ̃ˑ]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /ˈos.ku.lum/, [ˈɔskulum]

Noun

ōsculum n (genitive ōsculī); second declension

1. a kiss
   • 8 CE, Ovid, Fasti 3.509:

     occupat amplexū lacrimāsque per ōscula siccat

     He holds her in loving embraces, and her tears he dries through kisses.
     (Ariadne and her husband Dionysus reconcile following his infidelity to her.)

2. a little mouth

Declension

Second-declension noun (neuter).

Case	Singular	Plural
Nominative	ōsculum	ōscula
Genitive	ōsculī	ōsculōrum
Dative	ōsculō	ōsculīs
Accusative	ōsculum	ōscula
Ablative	ōsculō	ōsculīs
Vocative	ōsculum	ōscula

Synonyms

• (kiss): bāsium n, suāvium n

Descendants

• → English: osculum
• → French: oscule
• → Italian: osculo
• Romanian: uști
• → Portuguese: ósculo
• → Spanish: ósculo

See also

• ōs

References

• “osculum”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• “osculum”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
• osculum 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)
• osculum in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.