Other forms: bones
A bone is one of the hard white parts inside your body. Break a bone, bone marrow, a dog with a bone.
An adult has 206 of them and a newborn about 270, since many fuse with growth. Bone is living tissue and rebuilds itself constantly, replacing the whole skeleton over roughly a decade. Note bone dry; bone idle; a bone of contention; make no bones about it, meaning to be blunt; and feel it in your bones, meaning to know without evidence.
1nounboneOne of the hard parts of the skeleton.
“An adult has about 206 bones.”
bone is a body part.
Old English ban is Germanic with no relatives outside that family, which is unusual for a body word — most European languages use a word related to the Latin os.
Middle English
bon
English, today
bone
Built from
From Middle English bon. From Middle English bon, from Old English bān (“bone, tusk; the bone of a limb”), from Proto-Germanic bainą (“bone”), from bainaz (“straight”), possibly from Proto-Indo-European bʰeyh₂- (“to hit, strike, beat”). Cognate with Scots bane, been, bean, bein, bain (“bone”), frr bian, Biin, biinj (“bone; leg”), West Frisian bien (“bone”), Dutch been (“bone; leg”), German Low German Been, Bein (“bone”), German Bein (“leg”), German Gebein (“bones”), Swedish ben (“bone; leg”), Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Icelandic bein (“bone; leg”), Breton benañ (“to cut, hew”), Latin perfinēs (“break through, break into pieces, shatter”), ae 𐬠𐬫𐬈𐬥𐬙𐬈 (“they fight, hit”). Related also to Old Norse beinn (“straight, right, favourable, advantageous, convenient, friendly, fair, keen”) (whence Middle English bain, bayne, bayn, beyn (“direct, prompt”), Scots bein, bien (“in good condition, pleasant, well-to-do, cosy, well-stocked, pleasant, keen”)), Icelandic beinn (“straight, direct, hospitable”), Norwegian bein (“straight, direct, easy to deal with”). See bain, bein.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA