Dactylus

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Synonym of dactyl (“type of metrical foot”).
  2. 2
    The tip of a cephalopod's tentacle club

    "The distal end of the club, the dactylus (finger), is pointed and attenuated but is covered with hundreds of small suckers."

  3. 3
    The tip of a crustacean's leg

    "The tip of the dactylus is short and hooked, with a scoop-shaped depression on the anterior surface."

Synonyms

All synonyms
dactyl

Example

More examples

"The distal end of the club, the dactylus (finger), is pointed and attenuated but is covered with hundreds of small suckers."

Etymology

Unadapted borrowing from Latin dactylus. Doublet of dactyl and date.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.