Library / English Dictionary

LOINS

Pronunciation (US):

(GB):

 I. (noun) 

Sense 1

Meaning:

The lower part of the abdomen just above the external genital organs

Synonyms:

loins; pubes; pubic region

Classified under:

Nouns denoting body parts

Hypernyms ("loins" is a kind of...):

area; region (a part of an animal that has a special function or is supplied by a given artery or nerve)

Meronyms (parts of "loins"):

mons; mons pubis; mons veneris (a mound of fatty tissue covering the pubic area in women)

Sense 2

Meaning:

The region of the hips and groin and lower abdomen

Classified under:

Nouns denoting body parts

Hypernyms ("loins" is a kind of...):

body part (any part of an organism such as an organ or extremity)

Meronyms (parts of "loins"):

groin; inguen (the crease at the junction of the inner part of the thigh with the trunk together with the adjacent region and often including the external genitals)

Holonyms ("loins" is a part of...):

body; torso; trunk (the body excluding the head and neck and limbs)

Credits

 Context examples: 

Here and there the pale, aquiline features of a sporting Corinthian recalled rather the Norman type, but in the main these stolid, heavy-jowled faces, belonging to men whose whole life was a battle, were the nearest suggestion which we have had in modern times of those fierce pirates and rovers from whose loins we have sprung.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Yet, if for an instant he lay the cross aside, or if he fail to journey to Pitt's Deep, where it is ordered that he shall take ship to outland parts, or if he take not the first ship, or if until the ship be ready he walk not every day into the sea as far as his loins, then he becomes outlaw, and I shall forthwith dash out his brains.

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

He had not yet attained his full six foot of stature, but no judge of a man (and every woman, at least, is one) could look at his perfect shoulders, his narrow loins, and his proud head that sat upon his neck like an eagle upon its perch, without feeling that sober joy which all that is beautiful in Nature gives to us—a vague self-content, as though in some way we also had a hand in the making of it.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

There were, it is true, no finer or braver men in the room than Jackson and Jem Belcher, the one with his magnificent figure, his small waist and Herculean shoulders; the other as graceful as an old Grecian statue, with a head whose beauty many a sculptor had wished to copy, and with those long, delicate lines in shoulder and loins and limbs, which gave him the litheness and activity of a panther.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)