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''cranium'' ▫ᴱᴺ Entries

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''cranium'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260610195455-00-⌔

cranium - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Noun

cranium (plural craniums or crania)

  • (anatomy) That part of the skull consisting of the bones enclosing the brain, but not including the bones of the face or jaw.
    • ✤ Synonyms: braincase, neurocranium
    • ✤ Hyponyms: calvarium, ethmoid, frontal, occipital, parietal, sphenoid
    • ✤ The Skull is divided into two parts, the Cranium and the Face. The Cranium is composed of eight bones; […]1
    • ✤ ‘I always ask leave, in the interests of science, to measure the crania of those going out there,’ he said.2
    • ✤ The cranium of the fowl is composed of the same elements as are present in the mammalian cranium, save that there is no interparietal.3
    • ✤ The cranial bones, or cranium (kra′ne-um), enclose and protect the fragile brain and furnish attachment sites for head and neck muscles.4
    • ✤ “The cranium is clearly plesiomorphic in overall form, presenting primitive traits shared by earlier hominins,” the authors wrote.5
  • (anthropology, informal) The upper portion of the skull, including the neurocranium and facial bones, but not including the jawbone (mandible).
    • ✤ In this study, the cranium recovered from the River Witham in Lincoln exhibited a black metallic staining on the surfaces of the teeth.6
  • (informal) Synonym of skull.

Etymology

From Medieval Latin crānium (“skull”), from Ancient Greek κρᾱνίον (krāníon, “skull”). By surface analysis, crani- +‎ -um.

Pronunciation

  • enPR: krā’nē-əm, IPA: /ˈkɹeɪ.ni.əm/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊
  • Audio (US): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -eɪniəm

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 1858, Henry Gray, “The Skull”, in Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical, page 19: ↩

  2. 1899 February, Joseph Conrad, “The Heart of Darkness”, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, volume CLXV, number M, New York, N.Y.: The Leonard Scott Publishing Company, […], →OCLC, part I, page 201: ↩

  3. 1908, J. McFadyean, “Part I: Osteology and Arthrology”, in The Comparative Anatomy of the Domesticated Animals, page 165: ↩

  4. 2010, Elaine N. Marieb, Katja Hoehn, “Chapter 7 “The Skeleton””, in Human Anatomy and Physiology, 8th edition, page 200: ↩

  5. 2025 September 27, Julia Jacobo, “Million-year-old skull could rewrite timeline of human origin, researchers say”, in ABC News ‎, archived from the original on 14 February 2026: ↩

  6. 2014, Emma L. Brown, Ronald A. Dixon, Jason W. Birkett, “The Discolouration of Human Teeth from Archaeological Contexts: Elemental Analysis of a Black Tooth from a Roman Cranium Recovered from the River Witham, Lincoln, UK”, in Journal of Anthropology, volume 2014, →DOI: ↩

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Secondary

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