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Glite Dictionary
🐌 A scraping organ 🌱 A leafy plant
radula

radula

1 9.9
A thin part like a tongue in snails and similar animals that scrapes food from surfaces
  • noun
  • /ˈræd.jə.lə/
  • Specialized
: radula
  • The radula helps the octopus to grip and manipulate its prey before ingestion.
  • use their radula

Examples

  • Many mollusks depend on their radula to effectively feed on various types of food in their environment.

  • Using a proboscis armed with a radula that bears an array of cutting teeth, the snail cuts a neat disk out of the urchin's shell.

    Academic text (1992)

  • The radula of the snail is an essential tool for scraping algae off rocks.

Surface Forms

radula singular
radulas plural

Etymology

The word radula for the mollusk organ comes from the Latin radula, a 'little scraper', from radere 'to scrape'. Think of it as a tiny 'rasp' or file in a snail's mouth that scrapes food, which is exactly why the organ has this name.