Meanings
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1
noun
the thighbone; the long bone between the hip and knee in a vertebrate
The X-ray showed a clean fracture near the top of the femur.
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2
noun
a principal leg segment in an arthropod, lying between the trochanter and tibia in an insect
In a grasshopper, the enlarged hind femur contains powerful jumping muscles.
Thesaurus
Etymology
Borrowed directly from Latin femur ("thigh, thighbone"). The anatomical adjective femoral comes from the related Latin stem femor-.