Word.ws English Dictionary

whale's tail

whale's tail noun: the distal bifurcation of the left anterior descending coronary artery.

Noun

whale's tail (plural whale's tails)

  1. (slang) The distal bifurcation of the left anterior descending coronary artery.
    • […] anterior descending coronary artery (i.e. the "mustache," "pitchfork," or "whale's tail"; Fig. 18.6, top); in the circumflex system, the distal bifurcation of the segment with the longest total distance that includes the[…]2000, Donald S. Baim, William Grossman, Grossman's Cardiac Catheterization, Angiography, and Intervention, Lippincott Raven
    • It then bifurcates distally and tapers out as a "whale's tail" at the cardiac apex, although sometimes it wraps around the apex to supply part of the inferior wall.2007, Eric J. Topol, Robert M. Califf, Textbook of Cardiovascular Medicine, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, →ISBN, page 1227
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: The tail of a whale.
  3. (slang) An alternative expression of the whale tail phenomenon where a thong peeks out above the waistband.
    • Another distraction occurs when pants ride low in the back and expose thong underwear, a phenomenon students have dubbed whales' tails...2004, Tom Quinn, “Updated Dress Code Addresses New Styles”, in The Oregonian

Forms of whale's tail

pluralwhale's tails

Questions about whale's tail

What does whale's tail mean?
Whale's tail means the distal bifurcation of the left anterior descending coronary artery.
What part of speech is whale's tail?
Whale's tail is a noun.
What is the plural of whale's tail?
The plural of whale's tail is whale's tails.

Words near whale's tail in the dictionary

  1. whale watchers
  2. whale watches
  3. whale watching
  4. whale's guide
  5. whale's road
  6. whale's tail
  7. whale's way
  8. whale-backed
  9. whale-fisher
  10. whale-fishers
  11. whale-path

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whale's tail (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: En-au-whale's tail.ogg.

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