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Pronunciation varies by accent · noun
(medicine) Abnormal thickening of the skull, especially that produced by synostosis of the parietal bone with the occipital bone..
The terms macro- and microcephalic are, in any case, quite generic, and simply indicate a morphological anomaly, which may include many widely different cases, such, for example, as rickets, hydrocephaly, pachycephaly, etc., all of which have in common the morphological characteristic of macrocephaly.
Like Chaucer's Miller, David Ritchie, the original of Scott's Black Dwarf, was an example of pachycephaly; i.e., he had the ability to run through doors with his hard skull.
The Miller breaks doors with his head (lines 550-51). This claim is feasible, for several nineteenth- and twentieth-century men are know to have performed similar feats. Thus 'we may be sure that between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries stretched a long, thick-set line of heroes whose pachycephaly was exploited to stir the wonder and respect of their less gifted fellows' (p 419).
Use pachycephaly when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.
Pachycephaly means (medicine) Abnormal thickening of the skull, especially that produced by synostosis of the parietal bone with the occipital bone..
The closest synonym depends on the sentence and intended sense.
The opposite depends on the specific sense.
The terms macro- and microcephalic are, in any case, quite generic, and simply indicate a morphological anomaly, which may include many widely different cases, such, for example, as rickets, hydrocephaly, pachycephaly, etc., all of which have in common the morphological characteristic of macrocephaly.
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