A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1029 entries
baleen
The filtering apparatus of the great whales — plates of keratin growing down from the upper jaw in a close-set rank, frayed on the inner edge into a mat of bristles. A whale takes in water and prey together, closes up, and drives the water back out through the plates, keeping whatever will not fit between them. Same material as your fingernails, arranged as a sieve the size of a garage door.
Etymology
Middle English balene, from Old French baleine, from Latin balaena, whale, itself borrowed from Greek phalaina. So the word for the strainer is simply the word for the animal — English took the Latin name of the whale and applied it to the one part of the whale that mattered commercially, the way ivory came to mean tusk. Whalebone is the older English term and there is no bone in it at all.
Notes
Because it is keratin, baleen is springy and holds a shape when heated, and it did the structural work of plastic long before plastic existed — corset stays, collar stiffeners, buggy whips, umbrella ribs, hoop skirts. Bowhead whales carry the longest plates, over four meters. Blue, fin, sei, humpback, right, gray, and minke whales all use them; the toothed whales went the other way entirely.