Noun: plectrum
| Singular | plectrum |
| Plural | plectrums; plectra |
Sample Sentences
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For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. [1854 August 9, Henry D[avid] Thoreau, “Winter Animals”, in Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, →OCLC, page 292:]
Nouns inflected like plectrum
hemiscrotum,
saeculum,
stramonium,
proscenium,
dinotherium,
quinquennium,
ambulacrum,
prolabium,
preepisternum,
coimperium,
septennium,
fulcrum,
emporium,
subminimum,
mausolæum,
mausoleum,
serpentarium,
triregnum,
viaticum,
megaannum, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
Borrowed from Latin plēctrum, from Ancient Greek πλῆκτρον (plêktron, “anything to strike with, an instrument for striking the lyre, a spear point”), from πλήσσειν (plḗssein, “to strike, to smite, to sting”). Displaced native Old English sleġel. See: Latin Nouns '
plēctrum'.