biceps
Pluralbiceps, bicepses, bicipites
- 1The flexor muscle of the upper arm, known anatomically as the biceps brachii, that bends the elbow.
The trainer showed her how to isolate the biceps during a curl.
A torn biceps can take months to heal fully.
- 2The upper arm, or especially the group of muscles in the upper arm, used loosely in informal speech.
He rolled up his sleeve and tensed his biceps for the photo.
Months at the gym finally gave him the biceps he wanted.
Note
Here the word drifts from anatomy to a place on the body. Neil Gaiman's Odin pushes an arm-ring "up high on his biceps," and in Lisa Plumley's Once Upon a Christmas a woman holds a man's biceps for balance; neither means the elbow flexor itself. Casual speech also has slangier stand-ins (guns, pipes, pythons), all of them plural, where biceps keeps its single form.
- 3Any muscle that has two heads, meaning two separate points where it begins.
Anatomists classify any two-headed muscle as a biceps, whether in the arm or the leg.
The hamstring group includes a biceps with two distinct heads.
Note
The name describes a shape rather than one muscle: Latin biceps, "two-headed," from bis "double" and caput "head." Anatomy therefore finds more than one, and the chief flexor at the back of the thigh is the biceps of the leg. The final -s belongs to the Latin word and is not a plural ending, so one muscle is a biceps. For more than one, English uses biceps or bicepses, and the Latin bicipites survives too.
- 4A position in a metrical pattern that can be filled by either one long syllable or two short syllables.
A skilled poet uses the biceps to vary the line's rhythm without breaking the meter.
In the hexameter, the princeps is always a long syllable, while the biceps may be two shorts or one long.
Note
Prosody borrowed the "two-headed" name explained under the anatomical sense, and it suits a position that can take two short syllables. The term belongs to the study of Greek meter, where it pairs with the princeps, the position that holds a long syllable. The two were not always equal in time: in ordinary speech rhythm the biceps seems to have run slightly longer. A single long syllable filling it therefore had to be drawn out a little.
Practice
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Origin
From Latin biceps ("double-headed, two-peaked"), formed from bis ("double") plus caput ("head").