Cavin
name, noun ·2 syllables ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A hollow route, adapted to cover troops and facilitate their approach to a place.
"Having a sufficient Knowledge of the several Parts of the Fortification, by means of Spies, Deserters, Prisoners, and from printed or drawn Plans, The Nature of the Ground about the Place must be well examined and observed, whether there are any hollow Ways, or Cavins, by means of which the Trenches may be opened nearer than usual;"
- 2 A type of protein that is involved in forming the caveola of many vertebrate cells.
"The observation that lipid rafts and caveolae were highly enriched in PS in the cytoplasmic leaflet of the membrane (Pike et al. 2002) nicely dovetails with recent findings that all cavin proteins that are required for caveola biogenesis bind PS."
- 1 A surname.
Example
More examples"Having a sufficient Knowledge of the several Parts of the Fortification, by means of Spies, Deserters, Prisoners, and from printed or drawn Plans, The Nature of the Ground about the Place must be well examined and observed, whether there are any hollow Ways, or Cavins, by means of which the Trenches may be opened nearer than usual;"
Etymology
From French cavin (same meaning), ultimately from Latin cavus.
From cav(eola) + -in. Coined in J. Vinten et al. (2005), “Identification of a major protein on the cytosolic face of caveolae”, in Biochimica et Biophysica Acta - Biomembranes, volume 1717, number 1, pages 34-40: Cav-p60, a specific and ubiquitous caveolar protein, was[…]identified as similar to a GeneBank entry annotated mouse polymerase transcript release factor (PTRF)[…]The results show that in a large number of cell types, PTRF is essentially located to caveolae, and that each caveola harbors many copies of the protein. Consequently, we suggest the name Cavin [sic – not capitalised elsewhere in the article] for this protein. .
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.