Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun In botany, the broad expansion of the style in plants of the milkweed family, especially in Stapelia.
  • noun In Roman antiquity, a large oblong shield of heavy-armed Roman legionaries, as distinguished from the small round shield, or clypeus.
  • noun In anatomy, the knee pan; the rotula or patella. See cut under knee-joint.
  • noun In zoöl, a plate, shield, buckler, or some similar part; a large scale; a scute; a scutellum; especially, some piece of dermal armor or exoskeletal formation, as one of the bony plates of a sturgeon or a crocodile, a piece of the shell of a turtle, a ring or plate of an armadillo, one of the great scales of a pangolin, the frontal shield of a coot, etc. See cuts under Acipenser, armadillo, carapace, coot, crocodile, pangolin, and shield.
  • noun In old law, a penthouse or awning.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Rom. Antiq.) An oblong shield made of boards or wickerwork covered with leather, with sometimes an iron rim; -- carried chiefly by the heavy-armed infantry.
  • noun (O. Eng. Law), obsolete A penthouse or awning.
  • noun The second and largest of the four parts forming the upper surface of a thoracic segment of an insect. It is preceded by the prescutum and followed by the scutellum. See the Illust. under Thorax.
  • noun One of the two lower valves of the operculum of a barnacle.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • proper noun astronomy A small autumn constellation of the northern sky, said to resemble a shield. It lies between the constellations of Aquila, Sagittarius, and the tail of Serpens.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Named by the astronomer Johannes Hevelius in 1687; from Latin scūtum ("shield"). The original name given was Scutum Sobiescianum (Sobieski's Shield) in commemoration of the victory of the Polish, Austrian, and German forces led by the Polish king Jan III Sobieski at the battle of Vienna.

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Examples

  • More than 6,000 ly away, binoculars show it near the SW corner of our chart in Scutum the Shield.

    Starwatch: The summer triangle 2011

  • Scutum habent de viminibus vel de virgulis factum.

    The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation 2003

  • It shows the large star-cloud in the constellation of Scutum where millions of stars, though vastly distant from each other, are seen apparently crowded together (through their immense distance from us) like the drops of water that form our terrestrial clouds. '

    Photographing the Sky 1920

  • Image: Aquila and Scutum constellation. jpg | Constellations of Aquila and Scutum. .jpg | Constellations of Aquila and Scutum

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] Skatemerika 2010

  • The galaxy's two major arms (Scutum-Centaurus and Perseus) can be seen attached to the ends of a thick central bar, while the two now-demoted minor arms (Norma and Sagittarius) are less distinct and located between the major arms.

    Image Gallery 2010

  • Image: Aquila and Scutum constellation. jpg | Constellations of Aquila and Scutum. .jpg | Constellations of Aquila and Scutum

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] Skatemerika 2010

  • Image: Aquila and Scutum constellation. jpg | Constellations of Aquila and Scutum. .jpg | Constellations of Aquila and Scutum

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] Skatemerika 2010

  • Image: Aquila and Scutum constellation. jpg | Constellations of Aquila and Scutum. .jpg | Constellations of Aquila and Scutum

    CreationWiki - Recent changes [en] Skatemerika 2010

  • The galaxy's two major arms (Scutum-Centaurus and Perseus) can be seen attached to the ends of a thick central bar, while the two now-demoted minor arms (Norma and Sagittarius) are less distinct and located between the major arms.

    Image Gallery 2010

  • The galaxy's two major arms (Scutum-Centaurus and Perseus) can be seen attached to the ends of a thick central bar, while the two now-demoted minor arms (Norma and Sagittarius) are less distinct and located between the major arms.

    Image Gallery 2010

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