bone
noun · verb · adjective · adverb
Simple meaning
Hard material, mostly calcium, forming the skeleton of animals
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
bohnIPA pronunciation (US)
ˈboʊn
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
noun
uncountable
A composite material consisting largely of calcium phosphate and collagen and making up the skeleton of most vertebrates.
countable
Any of the components of an endoskeleton, made of this material.
An off-white colour, like the typical colour of bone.
One of the rigid parts of a corset that forms its frame, the boning, originally made of whalebone.
Anything made of bone, such as a bobbin for weaving bone lace.
figurative
The framework of anything.
verb
To prepare (meat, etc) by removing the bone or bones from.
Study intensively, as before an exam
“I had to bone up on my Latin verbs before the final exam.”
To put whalebone into.
To polish boots to a shiny finish.
To nag, especially for an unpaid debt.
transitiveslang
To apprehend, steal.
adjective
Of an off-white colour, like the colour of bone.
adverb
Used before an adjective as an intensifier
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B1 · Intermediate
- Frequency
- Common
- Typical Use
- Everyday English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: A composite material consisting largely of calcium phosphate and collagen and making up the skeleton of most vertebrates.
Used this way, bone is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It usually sounds natural in a wide range of settings.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Neutral
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Matter-of-fact
- Usage feel
- Neutral and straightforward
Nearby words
- osseous tissue , a specialist term, precise but narrower
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
A percussion instrument consisting of a pair of hollow pieces of wood or bone (usually held between the thumb and fingers) that are made to click together (as by Spanish dancers) in rhythm…
An embarrassing mistake.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
Related to A composite material consisting largely of calcium phosphate and collagen and making up the skeleton of most vertebrates.
Having bones especially many or prominent bones.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Fatty matter in bones extracted with solvents or by boiling or steaming.
A cell from which bone develops.
Bipedal herbivorous dinosaurs with bony crowns.
The fatty network of connective tissue that fills the cavities of bones.
The subject of a dispute.
The liquid portion of bone fat.
Related Words
Connected to the same idea, not synonyms.
- skullnoun
- jawnoun
- tissuenoun
- osteoporosisnoun
- bonesnoun
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.