malleus.
hammer; mallet, maul; (also medical for the inner ear bone);
Meaning & usage
hammer, mallet
a disease of animals
the malleus, a small bone in the middle ear
Where this word comes from
Disputed. * Schrijver proposes that the term derives from the affixation of -eus to an older form *malalo-, thereby creating *malaleos, which syncopated into malleus. According to this theory, the form *malalo- would derive from *mola-lo-, itself from Proto-Indo-European *molH-lo-. The term would be connected to the root *melh₂- (“to grind, crush”), whence also molō (“to grind”) Compare similar semantic development from the same Proto-Indo-European root in Old Church Slavonic млатъ (mlatŭ, “hammer”), beside the verb млѣти (mlěti, “grind”). * Alternatively, the linguist Blanca María Prósper proposes that the term may instead derive from earlier *mallo-, itself from older *mar(a)lo-, from Proto-Indo-European *mr̥h₂-(e)lo-, ultimately from the root *merh₂-, whence also Proto-Celtic *marnati.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.