This is a series of posts on interesting and unusual words and phrases.
The first set of words are adjectives that describe a shape and are often used in botany, mineralogy, and describing artistic forms.
The word for today is scaphoid: shaped like a boat, from the Greek, skaphos meaning “boat.”
The scaphoid bone is one of the carpal bones of the wrist. It is situated between the hand and forearm on the thumb side of the wrist (also called the lateral or radial side). It forms the radial border of the carpal tunnel. The scaphoid bone is the largest bone of the proximal row of wrist bones, its long axis being from above downward, lateralward, and forward. It is approximately the size and shape of a medium cashew nut.
The word scaphoid (Greek: σκαφοειδές) is derived from the Greek skaphos, which means “a boat”, and the Greek eidos, which means “kind”.[7] The name refers to the shape of the bone, supposedly reminiscent of a boat. In older literature about human anatomy,[4] the scaphoid is referred to as the navicular bone of the hand (this time from the Latin navis for boat); there is also a bone in a similar position in the foot, which is called the navicular. The modern term for the bone in the hand is scaphoid; in human anatomy the term navicular is reserved for the bone in the foot.
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