sulcus

Borrowed from Latin sulcus (“a furrow made by a plow”). Doublet of sullow ("plough").

• IPA^(key): /ˈsʌl.kəs/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ʌlkəs
• Hyphenation: sul‧cus

sulcus (plural sulci)

1. (anatomy) A furrow or groove in an organ or a tissue, especially that marking the convolutions of the surface of the brain.

   Hyponyms: central sulcus, cruciate sulcus, lateral sulcus

   Coordinate terms: (elevation) gyrus; (depression) fossa, fovea, fissure, cleft, lacuna, vallecula

   The sulci and gyri are the grooves and ridges, respectively.

   • 1996, David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest […], Boston, Mass., New York, N.Y.: Little, Brown and Company, →ISBN, page 186:

     The Union’s soft latex-polymer roof is cerebrally domed and a cloudy piamater pink except in spots where it’s eroded down to pasty gray, and everywhere textured, the bulging rooftop, with sulci and bulbous convolutions.

   • 1999, Thomas C. Pritchard, Kevin D. Alloway, Medical Neuroscience‎^[1], page 55:

     The largest sulcus, the longitudinal fissure, divides the brain into left and right hemispheres.

   • 2006, Inderbir Singh, Textbook of Human Neuroanatomy‎^[2], 7th edition, page 72:

     Unlike most other sulci, the lateral sulcus is very deep.

   • 2014, John Kiernan, Raj Rajakumar, Barr's The Human Nervous System: An Anatomical Viewpoint‎^[3], 10th edition, page 213:

     The large surface area of the human cerebral cortex results in a pattern of gyri and sulci.

2. (planetology) A region of subparallel grooves or ditches formed by a geological process.

• “sulcus”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.
• “sulcus”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.

From Proto-Italic *solkos, from Proto-Indo-European *solk-o-s (“furrow”), *selk- (“to pull, drag”), whence also Old English sulh. Doublet of holcus.

• (Classical Latin) IPA^(key): [ˈsʊɫ.kʊs]
• (modern Italianate Ecclesiastical) IPA^(key): [ˈsul.kus]

sulcus m (genitive sulcī); second declension

1. (agriculture) A furrow made by a plow.

   Synonym: fossa

2. (transferred sense):
   1. (agriculture) Ploughing.
   2. (of things resembling a furrow)
      1. A long, narrow trench; a ditch.
      2. (in general) A rut or track.

Second-declension noun.

• “sulcus”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• “sulcus”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
• "sulcus", in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
• sulcus in Gaffiot, Félix (1934) Dictionnaire illustré latin-français, Hachette.
• De Vaan, Michiel (2008) Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 7), Leiden, Boston: Brill, →ISBN