navel

Pluralnavels

Formsnavels

1. 1
   nouncountable

   The small hollow or knob in the middle of the belly of a placental mammal, marking where the umbilical cord was attached before birth.

   The doctor checked for redness around the newborn's navel.

   Some people have a navel that pokes outward rather than sitting recessed.

   Similarbellybutton, umbilicus

   Note

   Old English nafola stands behind it, kin to Dutch navel, German Nabel, Latin umbilīcus and Greek omphalós. The Latin cousin gives English umbilical, so the cord and the mark it leaves are named from one root by two routes. Anatomically the word covers both shapes, the hollow and the bump. Either way it is a scar where the cord detached after birth, not an opening.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   The central part or point of anything; the middle around which the rest is arranged.

   The grand cathedral marked the spiritual navel of the medieval town.

   Her argument kept circling back to the navel of the dispute: who actually owned the land.

   Similarcenter, heart, hub, core

   Oppositeperiphery

   Note

   Here the center of the body becomes the center of a place. Milton's sorcerer dwells "within the navel of this hideous wood" (1637), and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (2004) has a muddy square "with a plinth plonked in its navel." It usually takes of or a possessive and names an innermost middle rather than a measured one, keeping a trace of the anatomical navel.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A common variety of seedless orange marked by a small navel-like formation at the end opposite the stem.

   A ripe navel makes a perfect afternoon snack.

   The grocery stocked crates of navels alongside the grapefruit.

   Note

   A grower's and grocer's clipping of navel orange. It is an ordinary countable noun. Peter K. Thor and Edward V. Jesse (1981) write of planted acreage in northern California rising "especially in navels," and shoppers buy crates of navels. Context nearly always settles which navel is meant, since fruit talk rarely overlaps with the body.

4. 4
   nounhistoricalcountable

   An eye on the underside of a carronade for fastening the gun to its carriage.

   The gunner secured the carronade by passing a bolt through its navel.

   Each navel was cast as part of the gun's lower body.

   Note

   A gunnery term that went out with the gun itself. The carronade was a short, large-bore naval gun of the late eighteenth century. It had a lug cast beneath the barrel and bored with an eye, and a bolt through that eye fixed the piece to its sliding wooden carriage. Today the term turns up only in accounts of old naval ordnance.

5. 5
   verbliterarytransitive

   Of a structure or feature, to occupy and mark the central point of a landscape.

   Ancient standing stones navel the windswept plateau in the poet's vision.

   In her verse, a ruined tower navels the silent moor.

   Note

   A poet's verb that nearly always appears as a participle. Byron's Nemi lies "navelled in the woody hills" (1818), Wiffen's ruined temple stands "navelled in the pines," and Cecil Day Lewis still uses it in 1965, of a tree at the heart of a courtyard. The usual pattern is navelled in or upon a place, meaning nestled at its heart, as the "middle" meaning suggests. American spelling drops a letter: naveled.

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