- 1括約肌（如「肛門括約肌」「賁門括約肌」）
A sphincter is a ring of muscle around an opening in the body. When it tightens, the opening closes; when it relaxes, the opening lets something through. You have many of them: at the bottom of the stomach, where the tube from your mouth joins the stomach, around the bladder, in the eye around the pupil, and — the one most people think of first — at the . It is a plain medical noun, countable (one sphincter, two sphincters), and doctors say it without any fuss. In English, though, the word can raise a laugh or people, because listeners assume you mean the one at the bottom. Because of that it also has a use: sphincter-tightening, sphincter-clenching, meaning very . Doctors often name which one they mean — the anal sphincter, the lower oesophageal sphincter (the one whose weakness causes 胃食道逆流). A related word your students may meet is sphincter muscle, which is just the same thing said twice.
組成A learned borrowing from Late Latin sphincter, from Ancient Greek σφιγκτήρ (sphinktēr), from a verb meaning "to squeeze, to bind tight" — so, literally, "the squeezer". The root is ultimately Pre-Greek, meaning it came into Greek from an older language of the area.
同家族的字
- sphinxpossibly the same Greek root 'to squeeze, to strangle' — scholars are not certain, so treat it as a maybe
原始詞典資料1 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
sphincternoun/ˈsfɪŋk.tɚ/
- 1
anatomymedicinesciencesA ringlike band of muscle that surrounds a bodily opening (such as the anus or the openings of the stomach), constricting and relaxing as required for normal physiological functioning.
- the sphincter of the bladder
- the iris sphincter in the eye
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。