# anatomy

Pronunciation: say "uh-NA-tuh-mee" /əˈnæt.ə.mi/

## Noun

1. The science that studies the form and structure of living organisms, or the bodily structure and organization it describes.
   - Simple: The science of how the bodies of living things are built, or how a body is built.
   - _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._
2. The way a living body or any part of it is organized in terms of structure or function.
   - Simple: The way the body of a living thing, or one part of it, is built and works.
   - _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._
3. A polite word for the human body, used especially when the private parts are meant.
   - Simple: A polite word for the body, used mostly when talking about the private parts.
   - _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._
4. The physical form or build of a particular person. *(colloquial)*
   - Simple: The shape of a person's body.
   - _After six months of training, she was proud to show off her new anatomy at the beach._
   - _The tailor took one look at my anatomy and said no off-the-rack suit would ever fit._
5. The act of taking anything apart, physically or in thought, in order to examine its parts.
   - Simple: The act of taking something apart, in real life or in your mind, to look closely at each part.
   - _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._
6. A book or scholarly treatise on the form and structure of living bodies.
   - Simple: A book that describes how the body is built.
   - _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._

## Noun

7. A skeleton, or a dead body. *(archaic)*
   - Simple: The bones of a dead body, or a dead body itself.
   - _The medical college kept a wired anatomy, every bone in place, in a glass case at the end of the hall._
   - _Searchers carried the anatomy of the drowned sailor up from the shore and laid it in the church._

## 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.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/anatomy (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).