skeletal
Meaning of skeletal: An adjective doing heavy lifting in reports: it can mean bone, or muscle attached to bone, depending on the noun.
Definition of skeletal
Skeletal describes anything belonging to or affecting the skeleton, the framework of bones and cartilage that supports the body. It appears in the names of structures, such as skeletal muscle, and in descriptions of disease, such as skeletal metastasis or skeletal deformity. The word points to the bony framework as a whole rather than to any single named bone.
What does skeletal muscle mean?
Skeletal muscle is the meat of the body: the muscle anchored to bone by tendons and moved deliberately, as when a hand closes or a knee straightens. It is one of three kinds of muscle, and the name distinguishes it from the other two rather than saying anything about bone itself. Under a microscope it shows fine cross stripes, so it is also called striated muscle. It is the tissue that wastes in prolonged illness, cramps after hard exertion, and releases the enzymes measured when muscle damage is suspected.
How do the muscle types compare?
| Type | Where it is | Under control? |
|---|---|---|
| Skeletal | Attached to bones across the body | Voluntary |
| Smooth | Walls of gut, airways, bladder and vessels | Involuntary |
| Cardiac | Wall of the heart only | Involuntary, self-triggering |
Where else does the word turn up?
A skeletal survey is a set of plain x-rays covering the whole skeleton, taken in one sitting to look for damage that could be scattered anywhere, and it is used both in bone marrow cancers and where injuries in a child need mapping. Skeletal maturity, judged from x-rays of the hand, estimates how much growth is left. Skeletal metastasis means cancer that has spread into bone, and the phrase skeletal related event covers the consequences of that spread, including fracture through a weakened bone and pressure on the spinal cord. Skeletal traction applies pull through a pin passed into bone rather than through strapping on the skin.
Why is skeletal not simply a synonym for bone?
The skeleton is more than its bones. Cartilage, joints and the ligaments binding them are part of the same framework, so skeletal disorders include problems of joints and growth plates that involve no broken bone at all. In the other direction, skeletal muscle contains no bone whatsoever. Reading the word as bone alone therefore misses about half of where it is used.
Used in a sentence
Imaging was ordered to assess skeletal involvement before treatment was planned.
Good to know
The word carries two distinct senses in reports, since skeletal muscle names a tissue containing no bone while skeletal metastasis and skeletal survey refer to the bones themselves.
Word origin
Where “skeletal” comes from
From the Greek skeletos, meaning dried up, applied first to a dried body and then to the bones that remain once soft tissue is gone.