pachycephaly
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
32
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Abnormal thickening of the skull, especially that produced by synostosis of the parietal bone with the occipital bone.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "The terms macro- and microcephalic are, in any case, quite generic, and simply indicate a morphological anomaly, which may include many widely different cases, such, for example, as rickets, hydrocephaly, pachycephaly, etc., all of which have in common the morphological characteristic of macrocephaly."
- "Like Chaucer's Miller, David Ritchie, the original of Scott's Black Dwarf, was an example of pachycephaly; i.e., he had the ability to run through doors with his hard skull."
- "The Miller breaks doors with his head (lines 550-51). This claim is feasible, for several nineteenth- and twentieth-century men are know to have performed similar feats. Thus 'we may be sure that between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries stretched a long, thick-set line of heroes whose pachycephaly was exploited to stir the wonder and respect of their less gifted fellows' (p 419)."
Etymology
From pachy- + -cephaly.