remora
/ɹiˈmɔɹə/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.86 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
3
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Any of various elongate fish from the family Echeneidae, the dorsal fin of which is in the form of a suction disc that can take a firm hold against the skin of larger marine animals.
noun
A serpent.
Example Sentences
- "The Remoræ (Echeneisidæ) form the last family of the soft-finned, subbrachian fishes. They are characterized at once by the top of their heads being flattened, and furnished with transverse series of cartilaginous plates, somewhat similar to the plates under the toes of the Gecko, by which these fish attach themselves to ships, rocks, and marine bodies."
- "The remora, lump-sucker, and others are provided with a muscular disk in the form of a sucker, by which they adhere to other fish or bodies moving through the water: [...]"
- "[...] I could not but notice, with some degree of curiosity, the gradual approaches of one of these remorae of society into the good graces of as genuine an English family as ever left the fat fields of Suffolk to pay for peeping at foreign novelty."
- "It was all genuine footage of various kinds of ray-fish: first a manta gliding just below the surface of a purple sea near the coast of Argentina. He glided there amongst the light beams that penetrated the water like daggers stabbing into it, while remorae skirted among his wing-fins."
- "The tenacity with which remoras attach to their hosts is best illustrated by the practice of sea turtle fishing by fishermen in the Caribbean and off China and northern Australia [...], and in Yemen and Kenya, where it continues to this day. A fisherman ties a line around the tail of a remora and throws the fish into the water. The remora tightly attaches itself to a turtle, and the remora and its "catch" are then hauled ashore."
- "LORD SCARSDALE. [...] On the dexter ſide, the figure of Prudence repreſented by a woman, habited argent, mantled azure, holding in her ſiniſter hand a javelin entwined with a remora proper; [...]"
Etymology
Borrowed from Latin remora (“delay, hindrance, passive resistance”), from the belief that the fish would attach themselves to ships and slow them down, from re- (prefix meaning ‘back, backwards’) + mora (“delay”) (from Proto-Indo-European *mere (“to delay, hinder”), from *(s)mer- (“to fall into thinking, remember; to care for”)).
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ɹiˈmɔɹə/
- British English: /ɹɪˈmɔːɹə/