Word.ws English Dictionary

dentalium

dentalium noun: any of various tooth shells of the genus Dentalium.

dentalium: any of various tooth shells of the genus Dentalium
Image: H. Zell, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

dentalium (plural dentalia or dentaliums)

  1. Any of various tooth shells of the genus Dentalium.
    • Apart from the two or three bird masks, the only other zoomorphic mask was a wolf frontlet of cedar decorated in micaceous black paint with dentalium teeth, dentalium being an important form of wealth with some of the attributes of a currency.1999, Jonathan C. H. King, First Peoples, First Contacts: Native Peoples of North America, page 138

Forms of dentalium

pluraldentalia
pluraldentaliums

Origin of dentalium

Borrowed from translingual Dentalium, from Latin dentālis (“dental”), dēns (“tooth”), Proto-Italic *dents and Proto-Indo-European *h₃dónts.

Questions about dentalium

What does dentalium mean?
Dentalium means any of various tooth shells of the genus Dentalium.
What part of speech is dentalium?
Dentalium is a noun.
What is the plural of dentalium?
The plural of dentalium is dentalia.

Words near dentalium in the dictionary

  1. dentalised
  2. dentalises
  3. dentalising
  4. dentalism
  5. dentality
  6. dentalium
  7. dentaliums
  8. dentalization
  9. dentalizations
  10. dentalize
  11. dentalized

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dentalium (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “dentalium.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dentalium. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.