/anthropology/glossary
The literature of physical anthropology describes the peoples of the world in a vocabulary of its own. A population is dolichocephalic, hyperleptorrhine, brachyskelic; and a reader who meets these words in a monograph, or in the descriptions on which the Pheno Guesser draws, is left to take them as descriptions of appearance. They are not that, or not only that. Each is the name of a measurement, and behind the measurement stand two landmarks on the body, an instrument, a ratio, and a decision by some author to call one band of the ratio's values by that name. The word carries all of this and shows none of it. To read it as a plain description is therefore to accept a procedure one has not seen and a convention one has not weighed; and since the procedures differed between schools and the conventions between authors, two writers who use the same word may be saying different things, and a reader who takes both at their word will be misled by both.
This glossary restores to each word what it carries. Its purpose is not to replace the vocabulary, which is compact and, once understood, exact, but to make it legible, so that a reader who finds a population called brachycephalic knows what was measured, by what technique, and by whose cut, and can judge what the description is worth.
The entries accordingly follow one order. Each begins with the term and its elements, because the vocabulary is built from a small stock of Greek parts and the parts are the quickest way into it. It proceeds to the landmarks and the instrument, to the formula, and to the class boundaries, which are set out author by author because no single division of any scale was ever agreed. It gives the history of the measure, which explains why the boundaries fell where they did and why the measure was valued as it was; and it ends with an assessment of what the measure is evidence of, that is, how far the trait is inherited, how far it answers to conditions, and what, if anything, it indicates beyond itself. Where a term occurs in the corpus of the Pheno Guesser, the entry records the types described by it, so that the vocabulary can be seen in use.
Status: Preliminary. The boundary tables cite the standard handbooks and are being checked against the primary editions; entries are added as they are completed.
Nearly every term in the vocabulary is a compound of two Greek elements, a prefix that states a quantity and a root that names the part of the body to which the quantity applies, joined by an adjectival ending. The compound is transparent once its parts are known. Hyperleptorrhine resolves into hyper-, beyond, lepto-, narrow, and -rrhine, of the nose, and so names a nose narrower than the narrow class; chamaecranic resolves into chamae-, low, and -cranic, of the skull. The stock of prefixes is about a dozen and the stock of roots about ten, and because the two combine regularly, the whole vocabulary can be read from the two tables that follow.
| Prefix | Greek | Sense | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| dolicho- | δολιχός | long | head length |
| brachy- | βραχύς | short | head; trunk or leg, in opposite senses (see the third principle below) |
| meso- | μέσος | middle | the middle class of any scale; also Sheldon's middle somatotype |
| macro- | μακρός | long, great | trunk or leg |
| lepto- | λεπτός | narrow, slender | nose, face |
| platy- | πλατύς | broad, flat | nose; the German handbooks write chamaerrhine for the same class |
| eury- | εὐρύς | broad | face |
| chamae- | χαμαί | on the ground, low | skull height |
| ortho- | ὀρθός | straight, upright | medium-high skull; straight jaw profile |
| hypsi- | ὕψι | high | skull height |
| pro- | πρό | forward | jaw profile |
| ecto- / endo- | ἐκτός / ἔνδον | outer / inner | Sheldon's somatotypes, named for the embryonic germ layers |
| epi- | ἐπί | upon | epicanthic fold |
| steato- | στέαρ | fat | steatopygia |
| hyper- | ὑπέρ | beyond | intensifies a class: hyperbrachycephalic |
| ultra- | (Latin) | beyond | a band beyond hyper-, met in individuals rather than in the means of populations |
| Root | Greek | Object | Measure |
|---|---|---|---|
| -cephalic | κεφαλή | head, on the living | cephalic index; head height taken on the living |
| -cranic | κρανίον | skull | height-length index; the skull forms of the cephalic classes (dolichocrany) |
| -rrhine | ῥίς, ῥιν- | nose | nasal index |
| -prosopic | πρόσωπον | face | facial index |
| -skelic | σκέλος | leg | relative trunk length, in two opposed senses |
| -gnathic | γνάθος | jaw | facial profile, prognathism |
| -morph | μορφή | form | somatotype |
| -canthic | κανθός | corner of the eye | epicanthic fold |
| -pygia | πυγή | rump | steatopygia |
| -trichous | θρίξ, τριχ- | hair | hair form: leiotrichous, cymotrichous, ulotrichous; the corpus describes hair in plain words and does not use them |
The regularity of the system is not complete. The literature formed only those compounds for which it had a measure and a use, and the table below shows which they are. It is drawn from the corpus: each cell gives the number of the 209 local varieties whose description uses that compound, and a blank cell marks a combination the literature did not make.
| prefix | -cephalic | -cranic | -rrhine | -skelic | -morph | -gnathic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| hyperdolicho- | 9 | |||||
| dolicho- | 82 | |||||
| meso- | 120 | 68 | 123 | 89 | ||
| brachy- | 81 | 60 | ||||
| hyperbrachy- | 12 | 15 | ||||
| hyperlepto- | 21 | |||||
| lepto- | 85 | |||||
| platy- | 62 | |||||
| hyperplaty- | 18 | |||||
| chamae- | 50 | |||||
| ortho- | 84 | 1 | ||||
| hypsi- | 110 | |||||
| macro- | 59 | |||||
| hypermacro- | 4 | |||||
| ecto- | 123 | |||||
| endo- | 106 | |||||
| pro- | 86 |
Counts from the corpus survey of September 2026. A type described as "(hyper-)platyrrhine" is counted under both platy- and hyperplaty-, and one described as "meso- brachycephalic" under both meso- and brachy-, since the source uses these compact forms for populations that straddle a cut.
The tables give the elements; three principles govern their use, and each entry applies them.
The first is that the suffix states the object measured, and with it the technique. Head height is written chamaecranic and hypsicranic because the height-length index is defined on the skull, from a landmark no instrument reaches on the living; head breadth is written -cephalic because the cephalic index is routinely taken on the living head. The same class therefore has a skull form and a living form, and because scalp and hair alter the measurement, the two forms do not share a scale. A term read without its suffix is a term read without its technique.
The second is that a class name is an author's convention. The indices are continuous ratios; the classes are bands cut into them; and since no natural break divides a long head from a short one, each author who cut a scale did so where the material before him suggested. Brachycephalic begins at 80 for Broca's successors and at 81 on Martin's living scale; leptorrhine is 43 to 47 on the skull, 55 to 70 by the morphological technique, and 67 to 77 by the physiognomic. A class name must accordingly be read with its authority, and the entries set out the boundaries author by author for that reason.
The third is that the sense of a compound is not always what its elements suggest. The -skelic classes are named by leg length in Manouvrier's skelic index, so that macroskelic means long-legged, and by trunk length in Stratz's scheme, so that the same word means long-trunked and short-legged. The corpus follows Stratz. A reader who carries the other sense will reverse every such description, and the entries therefore state which convention a text follows wherever the question arises.
Twenty entries cover the vocabulary of the corpus. The indices take the full order described above; the graded descriptors take the same order without a formula. Entries not yet linked are in preparation.
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