mons
Pluralmontes
- 1Short for mons pubis: the rounded mound of fatty tissue over the pubic bone.
The mons becomes more prominent after puberty as fatty tissue builds up.
Doctors examine the mons as part of a routine pelvic exam.
Note
Clinical shorthand: the Latin genitive pubis is dropped, and "mountain" alone stands for the whole term. In anatomy and medicine, context makes mons by itself clear as the fleshy rise over the pubic bones. The short form has moved into fiction too, as in Leone Ross's This One Sky Day (2021). Where it could be confused with the planetary sense, the full mons pubis is the safer choice.
Checked 31 Oct 2026 · 5 facts
- Anatomical mons is an ellipsis of mons pubis. en.wiktionary.org
- Mons means mountain in Latin, and pubis is a genitive. en.wiktionary.org
- The anatomical structure is a fleshy rise over the pubic bones. en.wikipedia.org
- Leone Ross's novel This One Sky Day was published in 2021. faberacademy.com
- This One Sky Day contains the anatomical short form mons. en.wiktionary.org
- 2A mountain or volcano on a planet or moon other than Earth.
Like Mount Everest, but rising from the surface of Mars or the Moon.
Olympus Mons, the largest mons on Mars, rises about two and a half times higher than Everest.
Geologists study how a martian mons forms without plate tectonics.
UsageCapitalized in names: Olympus Mons. The plural is montes.
- 3One of the fleshy pads at the base of the fingers on the palm; a mount.
Note
An obsolete palmist's term, borrowed straight from Latin mōns, "mountain". The same Latin word reached English as mount, its doublet. Palmistry pictured the palm as a small landscape of hills, several rising at the base of a finger. In palmistry the Latin form has since dropped out, and mount is the word to use today; in this sense its plural, montes, turns up only in older texts.
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Origin
Mount is a doublet of this word, which English borrowed from the Latin mōns, meaning "mountain."