A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1054 entries
annulus
A ring, and more precisely the space between two concentric circles. The word does a great deal of work across unrelated fields: the collar of collapsed veil tissue left around a mushroom’s stem, the ring of thick-walled cells that snaps a fern’s spore case open, the band of sun still showing around the moon in an eclipse that is not quite total.
Etymology
Latin — except that correct classical Latin is anulus, with one n, a diminutive of anus, “ring.” Medieval scribes doubled the consonant, most likely by confusion with annus, “year,” and English learned the word in its misspelled state and has kept it ever since. The standard English spelling preserves a medieval slip, and the word underneath it is the same one that gave us the anatomical anus — the Romans named both from the shape, exactly as Greek did with daktylios, a little finger-ring.