picas
picas is the plural of pica.
Meaning of pica
Noun (1)
pica (countable and uncountable, plural picas)
- A disorder characterized by appetite and craving for non-edible substances, such as chalk, clay, dirt, ice, or sand.
- The three most common nonfood picas were eating of strings and rags; feces, vomit, and urine; and paper, cigarettes, and soil.1986, George S Baroff, Mental retardation: nature, cause, and management
- Synonyms:
- allotriophagy, chthonophagia, cittosis, geophagy, pique
- A magpie.
Noun (2)
pica (countable and uncountable, plural picas)
- A size of type between small pica and English, now standardized as 12-point.
- I had been at Baldwin's before dinner in consequence of a letter from him which showed me that, by using a pica instead of an English letter in printing my book, I might comprise it within such a number of sheets as a guinea-volume should contain […].1790, James Boswell, edited by Danziger & Brady, Boswell: The Great Biographer, Yale, published 1989, page 30
- A font of this size.
- A unit of length equivalent to 12 points, officially ³⁵⁄₈₃ cm (0.166 in) after 1886 but now (computing) ¹⁄₆ in.
- A pie or directory: the book directing Roman Catholic observance of saints' days and other feasts under various calendars.
Noun capitalized: PICAs
PICAs
- plural of PICA
Questions about picas
- What is picas the plural of?
- Picas is the plural of pica.
- What part of speech is picas?
- Picas is a noun.
Words near picas in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: picas (page history and authors); PICAs (page history and authors); pica (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-picas.wav.
Cite this entry: “picas.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/picas. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.