Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Anatomy The large pouch at the beginning of the large intestine, located in the lower right-hand side of the abdomen.
  • noun A sac or bodily cavity with only one opening.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun See cœcum.
  • noun See cæcum.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The caecum, the cavity in which the large intestine begins and into which the ileum opens.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Alternative spelling of caecum.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the cavity in which the large intestine begins and into which the ileum opens

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Latin (intestīnum) caecum, blind (intestine), neuter of caecus, blind.]

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Examples

  • The doctor begins the procedure by inflating the colon with air until the cecum is distended.

    Percutaneous Cecostomy Tube Placement 2010

  • The cecum is the blind pouch in the intestine, the appendix is a cecum and all of the stuff looks like food matter or poo.

    Archive 2008-10-01 DNLee 2008

  • The cecum is the blind pouch in the intestine, the appendix is a cecum and all of the stuff looks like food matter or poo.

    Urban Wildlife Watch: Opossums DNLee 2008

  • The cecum is the gate-way between the large and small intestines.

    Appendicitis John Henry Tilden 1895

  • The cecum is a large, blind pouch, one of the shortest of the several divisions in the continuity of the intestinal canal, which begins where the small intestine ends, and ends where the large intestine begins.

    Appendicitis John Henry Tilden 1895

  • The latter are produced in a region of the rabbit's digestive tract called the cecum, a blind-end pouch located at the junction of the small and large intestines.

    Medlogs - Recent stories 2010

  • No less than Charles Darwin first suggested that the appendix was a vestigial organ from an ancestor that ate leaves, theorizing that it was the evolutionary remains of a larger structure, called a cecum, which once was used by now-extinct predecessors for digesting food.

    Lead Stories from AOL 2009

  • Chemicals that the body doesn’t need all that much, such as some excess vitamins, water, salt, and fats, are not absorbed and are passed along to a reservoir located between the small and large intestines called the cecum pronounced sea-come.

    You Raising Your Child Michael F. Roizen 2010

  • Chemicals that the body doesn’t need all that much, such as some excess vitamins, water, salt, and fats, are not absorbed and are passed along to a reservoir located between the small and large intestines called the cecum pronounced sea-come.

    You Raising Your Child Michael F. Roizen 2010

  • Chemicals that the body doesn’t need all that much, such as some excess vitamins, water, salt, and fats, are not absorbed and are passed along to a reservoir located between the small and large intestines called the cecum pronounced sea-come.

    You Raising Your Child Michael F. Roizen 2010

Comments

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  • "I had my eyes closed, concentrating on touch alone. The cecum had to be right under my fingers, that was the curve of the large intestine I could feel, inert but live, like a sleeping snake."

    —Diana Gabaldon, A Breath of Snow and Ashes (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), 437

    February 1, 2010