meatus

Learned borrowing from Latin meātus (“a going, passing; a way, path, passage”).

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA^(key): /miˈeɪ.təs/

  Audio (General American):

  (file)

• (plural) (General American) IPA^(key): /miˈeɪ.təs/, /miˈeɪˌtus/
• Rhymes: -eɪtəs

meatus (plural meatus or meatuses)

1. (anatomy) A tubular opening or passage leading to the interior of the body.

   Hyponyms: acoustic meatus, urinary meatus

   The urinary meatus is the opening of the urethra, situated on the glans penis in males, and in the vulva in females.

   • 1996, David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest […], Boston, Mass., New York, N.Y.: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 60:

     The illness. It came out of nowhere. His breathing all of a sudden started hurting the back of his throat. Then that overfull heat in various cranial meatus.

   • 2012, David W. Kennedy, Peter H. Hwang, editors, Rhinology: Diseases of the Nose, Sinuses, and Skull Base‎^[1], Thieme, →ISBN:

     The vibrissae are coarse hairs whose follicles are located just within the nasal meatus.

2. (anatomy) Ellipsis of acoustic meatus, the passage leading into the ear.

   Synonym: ear canal

• external auditory meatus
• meatal
• meato-
• permeate
• urethral meatus

• ear canal
• foramen

• “meatus”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
• “meatus”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.

• Matsue, autems, mutase

• (Classical Latin) IPA^(key): /meˈaː.tus/, [meˈäːt̪ʊs̠]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): /meˈa.tus/, [meˈäːt̪us]

Perfect passive participle of meō (“to go, to pass”).

meātus (feminine meāta, neuter meātum); first/second-declension participle

1. perfect passive participle of meō

First/second-declension adjective.

• commeātus
• intrameātus
• permeātus
• remeātus

From meō (“to go, pass”) +‎ -tus (action noun suffix).

meātus m (genitive meātūs); fourth declension

1. (literal) a going, passing, motion, course
2. (transferred sense) a way, path, passage
   • Cornelius Tacitus, De origine et situ germanorum 1.6–8:

     ‘Danubius molli et clementer edito montis Abnobae iugo effusus plures populos adit, donec in Ponticum mare sex meatibus erumpat; septimum os paludibus hauritur.’

     “The Danube pours down from the gradual and gently rising slope of Mount Abnoba, and visits many nations, to force its way at last through six channels into the Pontus; a seventh mouth is lost in marshes.”
     

   1. the avenues of sensation in the body

Fourth-declension noun.

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