meatus
/miˈeɪ.təs/
"meatus" is a 6-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“meatus” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 6
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - A tubular opening or passage leading to the interior of the body.
Corpus desk
Index EN-meatus · meatus · English
meatus · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 6 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "M" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | meatus |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /miˈeɪ.təs/ |
| Letters | 6 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “meatus” in English
Rare enough to double-check
meatus is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun, transcribed /miˈeɪ.təs/. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for meatus, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, suggesting its spelling stands apart enough that readers rarely confuse it with something else.
Etymologically, the entry records: Learned borrowing from Latin meātus (“a going, passing; a way, path, passage”). The correct English form is meatus, spelled M-E-A-T-U-S.
Definition
- 1A tubular opening or passage leading to the interior of the body.
- 2Ellipsis of acoustic meatus, the passage leading into the ear.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how meatus appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
The urinary meatus is the opening of the urethra, situated on the glans penis in males, and in the vulva in females.
The illness. It came out of nowhere. His breathing all of a sudden started hurting the back of his throat. Then that overfull heat in various cranial meatus.
Etymology
Learned borrowing from Latin meātus (“a going, passing; a way, path, passage”).
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.