stelai
/ˈstiːleɪ/
stelai is the plural of stele.
Meaning of stele
Noun (1)
stele (plural steles or stelai)
- An upright (or formerly upright) slab containing engraved or painted decorations or inscriptions; a stela.
- A superior class of members...had their names inscribed upon a marble stélé or column.1820, T. S. Hughes, Trav. Sicily, I x 303
- Any carved or engraved surface.
- Two large hieroglyphed steles incised upon the face of a projecting mass of boldly rounded cliff.1877, A. B. Edwards, Thousand Miles up Nile, VI 143
- An acroterion, the decoration on the ridge of an ancient Greek building such as a temple.
- Stele. The ornaments on the ridge of a Greek temple, answering to the antefixæ on the summit of the flank entablatures, are thus designated.c. 1840, Hosking, "Architecture" in Encyclopædia Britannica, III 470
Noun (2)
stele (plural steles)
- The central core of a plant's root and stem system, especially including the vascular tissue and developed from the plerome.
- The stele may have—in different structures—one to many protoxylem (primitive wood) groups, and is accordingly described as monarch...diarch...triarch...tetrarch...polyarch.1895, Sydney Howard Vines, A Students' Text-book of Botany, section 179
Origin of stelai
From Ancient Greek στῆλαι (stêlai), the plural form of στήλη (stḗlē, “upright rock; pillar; column”).
Questions about stelai
- What is stelai the plural of?
- Stelai is the plural of stele.
- How do you pronounce stelai?
- Stelai is pronounced /ˈstiːleɪ/.
Words near stelai in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: stelai (page history and authors); stele (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: “stelai.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/stelai. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.