Brisé Fan, Germany, 1899, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Miss Lenore Green.
Photo: Museum Associates/LACMA
Flabellate means “resembling a fan in shape” and can be pronounced \FLAB-uh-lit\ or \FLAB-uh-late\.
It comes from the Latin word for “fan,” flabellum, and is usually used in botany or zoology to describe the shape of a part of a plant or animal—long the province of fancy Latinate words rather than plain English ones—such as “flabellate antennae.” (Think of spatulate and trifoliate and palmate that similarly describe shapes found in nature.)
Flabelli- is the related Latin root that has been used to form words like flabelliform, flabellinerved, and flabellifoliate, terms used by scientists; Charles Darwin described “flabelliform” branches of plants, for example.
Another related word, flabellum, means both “a ceremonial fan” such as the large ostrich feather fan sometimes carried before the Pope on special occasions and the fanlike shape of certain insect body parts.
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