Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A small cluster or mass of blood vessels or nerve fibers.
  • noun A tuft of capillaries situated within a Bowman's capsule at the end of a renal tubule in the vertebrate kidney that filters waste products from the blood and thus initiates urine formation.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A small ball, as of yarn or something resembling it. Specifically In anatomy, a capillary plexus; a conglomeration, congeries, or rete of minute vessels or nerves, or both; in particular, the vascular glomerulus of the kidney (see below).
  • noun One of the powdery masses on the surface of some lichens.
  • noun Cooke's Manual.—

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

  • noun (Anat.) The bunch of looped capillary blood vessels in a Malpighian capsule of the kidney.

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

  • noun anatomy A small intertwined group of capillaries within nephrons of the kidney that filter the blood to make urine
  • noun Any of several other similar intertwined masses of things

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a small intertwined group of capillaries in the malpighian body; it filters the blood during urine formation

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[New Latin, diminutive of Latin glomus, glomer-, ball.]

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Examples

  • If you are speaking at the Society for Nephrology meeting, you probably don’t have to explain what a glomerulus is or convince them that its study is important for understanding kidney function.

    20 Minute Job Talk Candid Engineer 2009

  • Enteropneusta called the glomerulus, a vascular complex placed on either side of the anterior portion of the stomochord, projecting into the proboscis-coelom.

    Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" Various

  • The glomerulus is a lobulated net-work of convoluted capillary bloodvessels, held together by scanty connective tissue.

    XI. Splanchnology. 3b. The Urinary Organs 1918

  • A glomerulus is a capillary tuft surrounded by Bowman's capsule in nephrons of the vertebrate kidney.

    Clinical Cases and Images - Blog 2009

  • This results from the large amount of blood flow through the glomerulus, the relatively large pores (40 angstrom, an angstom is one one-hundred millionth of a centimeter) in the glomerular capillaries, and the hydrostatic pressure of the blood.

    Excretion of toxicants 2007

  • Filtration, the first process, takes place in the glomerulus, the very vascular beginning of the nephron.

    Excretion of toxicants 2007

  • Both lipid-soluble and polar substances will pass through the glomerulus into the tubule filtrate.

    Excretion of toxicants 2007

  • The nephron has three primary regions that function in the renal excretion process, the glomerulus, proximal tubule, and the distal tubule.

    Excretion of toxicants 2007

  • Small toxicants (both polar and lipid-soluble) are filtered with ease by the glomerulus.

    Excretion of toxicants 2007

  • The presence of albumin in the urine indicates that the glomerulus filtering system is damaged letting large molecules pass through.

    Excretion of toxicants 2007

Comments

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  • The only microanatomical term harder to pronounce than glomerulus is glomerular.

    December 20, 2007

  • Just pronounce it like our prez would: glom' u ler

    December 20, 2007

  • the malphigian body SOUNDS really lofty and Platonic...

    July 17, 2009