protuberance

UK/pɹəˈtjuː.bə.ɹəns/US/pɹəˈtuː.bɚ.əns/

nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans writtenformal · an editor’s judgement

Other forms: protuberances

A protuberance is a lump that sticks out from a surface. A knob, a bulge, a swelling that was not there before.

The word is formal and mostly medical or scientific: a doctor notes a small protuberance, a geologist describes one on a rock face. That neutrality is exactly why it gets used, since lump sounds alarming and bump sounds trivial while protuberance sounds like an observation. The verb is protrude, and the adjective protuberant describes anything that sticks out — protuberant eyes, a protuberant chin. All of them share the same idea of a shape pushing outwards from the thing it belongs to.

Definitions of protuberance

1nounprotuberanceA rounded part that sticks out from a surface.C2
“There was a small protuberance on the underside of the branch.”
synonyms: bulge, swelling

Where it comes from

A protuberance is a swelling pushed forward. Latin tūber meant a swelling or a lump, the same tūber that names the tuber in the ground, with prō, forward, in front of it.

Latin
prōtubērantia — bulge; protuberance
French
protubérance
English, today
protuberance

Built from

tūber · Latin — swelling; protuberance
-antia · Latin — -ance

From French protubérance, from Latin prōtubērantia (“bulge; protuberance”), from prō + tūber (“swelling; protuberance”) + -antia (“-ance”).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 7 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

protuberance in the wild

Depending on the tissue, processes may also be called by other terms, such as apophysis, tubercle, or protuberance.
Process (anatomy)
Along the internal surface of the occipital bone, at the point of intersection of the four divisions of the cruciform eminence, is the internal occipital protuberance.
Internal occipital protuberance
Near the middle of the squamous part of occipital bone is the external occipital protuberance, the highest point of which is referred to as the inion.
External occipital protuberance
The inion is the most prominent projection of the protuberance which is located at the posteroinferior (rear lower) part of the human skull.
External occipital protuberance
The nose is a protuberance in vertebrates which admits and expels air for respiration and contains olfactory receptors for sensing odors.
Nose (disambiguation)

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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.

Related words

the tūber family

tuberculosis

protuberance — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others

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