Word.ws English Dictionary

pendula

pendula is the plural of pendulum.

Meaning of pendulum

Noun

pendulum (plural pendulums or pendula)

  1. (clocks) A body suspended from a fixed support so that it swings freely back and forth under the influence of gravity, commonly used to regulate various devices such as clocks.
    1. (broadly, clocks) The tendency of a situation to oscillate (between two extremes).
      • The pendulum can be seen to be swinging in favour of rail, as with each issue of RAIL comes news of further intermodal service expansion.2021 October 20, Industry Insider, “The wheels turn slowly”, in RAIL, number 942, page 68
  2. A lamp, etc. suspended from a ceiling.
  3. A watch's guard-ring by which it is attached to a chain.

Origin of pendula

From pendulum, by analogy with Latin second declension nouns, such as bacterium/bacteria, though Latin pendulum is the neuter singular form of the adjective pendulus, whose neuter plural is pendula.

Questions about pendula

What is pendula the plural of?
Pendula is the plural of pendulum.

Words near pendula in the dictionary

  1. pendrins
  2. Pendry
  3. pends
  4. pendu
  5. penduculated
  6. pendula
  7. pendulant
  8. pendular
  9. pendulate
  10. pendulated
  11. pendulates

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pendula (page history and authors); pendulum (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.

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