noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun

1. 1
   The surgical procedure of making an incision into the chest, normally as a first step to gain access to the thoracic organs, such as the heart, the lungs, and the esophagus.
2. 2
   surgical incision into the chest walls opening up the pleural cavity wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms

lobotomy

Etymology

From thoraco- + -tomy.

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