Word.ws English Dictionary

tailshield

tailshield noun: the pygidium.

Noun

tailshield (plural tailshields)

  1. The pygidium.
    • Trilobites have a distinct headshield or cephalon and a distinct tailshield or pygidium, and in both these regions the original segmentation has been suppressed — more completely in the cephalon than in the pygidium — and [...]1985, E. W. Nield, Ted Nield, V. C. T. Tucker, Palaeontology, an Introduction

Forms of tailshield

pluraltailshields

Origin of tailshield

From tail + shield.

Questions about tailshield

What does tailshield mean?
Tailshield means the pygidium.
What part of speech is tailshield?
Tailshield is a noun.
What is the plural of tailshield?
The plural of tailshield is tailshields.

Words near tailshield in the dictionary

  1. tails down
  2. tails in
  3. tails off
  4. tailshaft
  5. tailshafts
  6. tailshield
  7. tailshields
  8. tailsitter
  9. tailsitters
  10. tailskid
  11. tailskids

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tailshield (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: “tailshield.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tailshield. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.