anatomy
Pluralanatomies
- 1The science that studies the form and structure of living organisms, or the bodily structure and organization it describes.
She took a summer course in human anatomy before starting medical school.
Students of plant anatomy examine thin slices of stems and roots under the microscope.
Note
The name records the method the science began with. It came through Old French and Latin from Greek anatomḗ, "dissection", literally "a cutting up", from aná "up" and témnō "to cut". The same -tomy ending names its older branches: zootomy for animals, phytotomy for plants, anthropotomy for the human body. In everyday use these are simply animal, plant and human anatomy.
- 2The way a living body or any part of it is organized in terms of structure or function.
The surgeon studied scans of the patient's unusual anatomy before planning the operation.
Whales and fish look similar from the outside, but their anatomies are very different.
Similarstructure
Note
Where the science is a subject you study, this is the structure itself, and it always belongs to something: the brain's anatomy, a patient's unusual anatomy. That is why it takes a possessive or an of phrase, and why it can be plural, as when whales and fish have very different anatomies. It covers a single organ as readily as the whole organism.
- 3A polite word for the human body, used especially when the private parts are meant.
The ball struck him in a particularly sensitive part of his anatomy, and he doubled over.
The editors airbrushed certain areas of the model's anatomy before the cover went to print.
Similarbody
Note
The euphemism nearly always works through a possessive phrase: a private part of his anatomy, any other part of his anatomy. Readers know exactly what is meant, and the vagueness is the point, since it keeps a news story printable while letting a wink through. Hear that wink before you use it: the phrase is coy rather than clinical, and a doctor would simply name the part.
- 4
- 5The act of taking anything apart, physically or in thought, in order to examine its parts.
Her new book is a careful anatomy of how the city's housing market collapsed.
The documentary offers a minute-by-minute anatomy of the night the dam failed.
Similaranalysis
Note
Here the dissection of the anatomist's science is carried out by the mind. The sense nearly always takes an of phrase (the anatomy of love, the anatomy of a discourse), and it makes a natural title: Burton's famous treatise is The Anatomy of Melancholy. Analysis is the plain synonym; anatomy keeps the image of a body laid open and examined part by part.
- 6A book or scholarly treatise on the form and structure of living bodies.
The old surgeon kept a heavily annotated anatomy on the shelf beside his desk.
The library's rare-book room holds several early anatomies with hand-colored plates.
Less common meaning
- 7A skeleton, or a dead body.
The medical college kept a wired anatomy, every bone in place, in a glass case at the end of the hall.
So did the Ægyptians, who in the middest of their banquetings, and in the full of their greatest cheere, caused the anatomy of a dead man to be brought before them, as a memorandum and warning to their guests.
Folio Society, 2006Note
The body the anatomist worked on, dead or stripped to the bone, could itself be called an anatomy. Older prose has Egyptian hosts, at the height of a banquet, bringing in the anatomy of a dead man as a warning to their guests. The use is archaic now: skeleton or corpse does the job in modern writing, and anatomy in this sense reads as a deliberate period touch.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English anatomie, via Old French anatomie and Latin anatomia, from Ancient Greek *anatomía, from anatomḗ (“dissection”, literally “cutting up”), from aná (“up”) + témnō (“to cut, incise”). By surface analysis it is ana- + -tomy, and it is a doublet of ottomy.