Word.ws English Dictionary

phacolith

phacolith noun: a lens-shaped mass that occurs in an anticlinal crest or synclinal trough.

Noun

phacolith (plural phacoliths)

  1. A lens-shaped mass that occurs in an anticlinal crest or synclinal trough.
    • This body is a phacolith intruded along the gneiss-schist boundary in the trough of a syncline that plunges 16° southeast.1947, Virgil Everett Barnes, Raymond Fillmore Dawson, George Ashworth Parkinson, Building Stones of Central Texas - Volume 19, page 21
    • This bedding forms a distinctive stratigraphic sequence that may be traced from phacolith to phacolith throughout an area of 1,200 square miles.1964, Geological Survey Professional Paper, volume 501, page A-81

Forms of phacolith

pluralphacoliths

Origin of phacolith

Coined by English geologist Alfred Harker in 1909 as phacolite, from phaco- (“lens”) + -lite or -lith (“rock”).

Questions about phacolith

What does phacolith mean?
Phacolith means a lens-shaped mass that occurs in an anticlinal crest or synclinal trough.
What part of speech is phacolith?
Phacolith is a noun.
What is the plural of phacolith?
The plural of phacolith is phacoliths.

Words near phacolith in the dictionary

  1. phacoidoscope
  2. phacoidoscopes
  3. phacoiridencleisis
  4. phacolite
  5. phacolites
  6. phacolith
  7. phacolithic
  8. phacoliths
  9. phacolysis
  10. phacolytic
  11. phacomatoses

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: phacolith (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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