collarbone

nounB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,986 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: collarbones

The collarbone is the long thin bone between the shoulder and the throat. You can trace it with a finger.

Doctors call it the clavicle, and it is one of the most commonly broken bones in the body, since it takes the force of any fall onto an outstretched arm. Cyclists break it constantly. It is close to the surface, which is why it shows clearly on a thin person and why a break is easy to see. The word is one word and describes exactly where a collar sits.

Definitions of collarbone

1nouncollarboneThe bone joining the breastbone to the shoulder blade.B1+
“He broke his collarbone coming off the bike.”

Where it comes from

Middle English
colar bane
English, today
collarbone

From Middle English colar bane; equivalent to collar + bone.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Body & Health, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 30 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

collarbone in the wild

Kehr's sign is a classic example of referred pain: irritation of the diaphragm is signaled by the phrenic nerve as pain in the area above the collarbone.
Kehr's sign
A clavicle fracture, also known as a broken collarbone, is a partial or complete break of the clavicle bone.
Clavicle fracture
The collarbones are typically either poorly developed or absent, which allows the shoulders to be brought close together.
Cleidocranial dysostosis
The trapezoid ligament is a ligament connecting the coracoid process of the scapula (the shoulder blade) to the trapezoid line of the clavicle (collarbone).
Trapezoid ligament
On 5 March 2014, he fractured his collarbone after a low-flying helicopter knocked him off his bike during the Stage 7 of the Tour de Langkawi.
Pavel Kochetkov

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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