Adjective

bone (not comparable)

Positive bone

Comparative not comparable

Superlative none (absolute)

1. (color/colour) Of an off-white colour, like the colour of bone.
2. (informal) Said of something that is rubbish or broken.

Noun

Singular bone

Plural countable and uncountable; plural bones

bone (countable and uncountable; plural bones)

1. (uncountable) A composite material consisting largely of calcium phosphate and collagen and making up the skeleton of most vertebrates.
2. (countable) Any of the components of an endoskeleton, made of bone.
3. A bone of a fish; a fishbone
4. One of the rigid parts of a corset that forms its frame, the boning, originally made of whalebone.
5. (color/colour) An off-white colour, like the colour of bone.

   bone colour:

6. (US, informal) A dollar.
7. (slang) An erect penis; a boner.
8. (slang) Dominoes or dice.
9. (slang) Shortened form of trombone.

Synonyms

• (rigid parts of a corset): rib, stay

Bones are rigid organs that form part of the endoskeleton of vertebrates. They function to move, support, and protect the various organs of the body, produce red and white blood cells and store minerals. Bone tissue is a type of dense connective tissue. Because bones come in a variety of shapes and have a complex internal and external structure they are lightweight, yet strong and hard, in addition to fulfilling their many other functions. One of the types of tissue that makes up bone is the mineralized osseous tissue, also called bone tissue, that gives it rigidity and a honeycomb-like three-dimensional internal structure. Other types of tissue found in bones include marrow, endosteum and periosteum, nerves, blood vessels and cartilage. There are 206 bones in the adult human body and about 300 in an infant.

Functions Bones have ten main functions:

Mechanical

• Protection — Bones can serve to protect internal organs, such as the skull protecting the brain or the ribs protecting the heart and lungs.
• Shape — Bones provide a frame to keep the body supported.
• Movement — Bones, skeletal muscles, tendons, ligaments and joints function together to generate and transfer forces so that individual body parts or the whole body can be manipulated in three-dimensional space. The interaction between bone and muscle is studied in biomechanics.
• Sound transduction — Bones are important in the mechanical aspect of overshadowed hearing.

Synthetic

• Blood production — The marrow, located within the medullary cavity of long bones and interstices of cancellous bone, produces blood cells in a process called haematopoiesis.

Metabolic

• Mineral storage — Bones act as reserves of minerals important for the body, most notably calcium and phosphorus.
• Growth factor storage — Mineralized bone matrix stores important growth factors such as insulin-like growth factors, transforming growth factor, bone morphogenetic proteins and others.
• Fat Storage — The yellow bone marrow acts as a storage reserve of fatty acids
• Acid-base balance — Bone buffers the blood against excessive pH changes by absorbing or releasing alkaline salts.
• Detoxification — Bone tissues can also store heavy metals and other foreign elements, removing them from the blood and reducing their effects on other tissues. These can later be gradually released for excretion.