Word.ws English Dictionary

pila

pila is the plural of pilum.

Meaning of pilum

Noun

pilum (plural pila or pilums)

  1. (historical) A Roman military javelin.
    • Besides a lighter spear, the Roman legionary grasped in his right hand the formidable pilum, a ponderous javelin whose utmost length was about six feet and which was terminated by a massy triangular point of steel of about eighteen inches.1776, Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Penguin 2000, page 21
  2. The columella on the surface of a pollen grain.

Noun

pila (plural pilae)

  1. A mortar.

Proper noun capitalized: Pila

Pila

  1. A municipality of Laguna, Philippines.

Forms of pila

pluralpilae

Origin of pila

From Latin pīla (“mortar”).

Questions about pila

What does pila mean?
Pila means a mortar.
What is pila the plural of?
Pila is the plural of pilum.
What part of speech is pila?
Pila can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of pila?
The plural of pila is pilae.

Words near pila in the dictionary

  1. pikuls
  2. pikuroside
  3. PIL
  4. pil pil
  5. pil-pil
  6. pila
  7. pilae
  8. pilaf
  9. pilaff
  10. pilaffs
  11. Pilafian

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pila (page history and authors); Pila (page history and authors); pilum (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: “pila.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pila. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.