curette

English

A spoon-shaped curette in sterile packaging

Etymology

Borrowed from French curette, from curer (“to clean out, scrape out”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /kjʊˈɹɛt/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -ɛt

Noun

curette (plural curettes)

2. (medicine, dentistry) A hand-held surgical instrument, often with a scoop or hook at its tip, used for cleaning or debriding biological tissue.
   • 2008, Cecilia Gorrel, Small Animal Dentistry‎^[1], Elsevier (Saunders), page 223:

     Curettes are used for the subgingival removal of dental deposits and for root planing. They can also be used supragingivally. The working tip of a curette is more slender than that of a scaler.

   • 2019, Shannon Withycombe, Lost: Miscarriage in Nineteenth-Century America, Rutgers University Press, unnumbered page:

     Beginning in the 1880s, the curette quickly became the popular choice for those doctors on the lookout for instrumental aid in cases of pregnancy loss.

   • 2020, Yu Matsumoto, 10: Bone Curette Handle for Improved Bone Removal in Endoscopic Ear Surgery, Seiji Kakehata, Tsukasa Ito, Daisuke Yamauchi (editors), Innovations in Endoscopic Ear Surgery, Springer, page 86,

     Curettes with an octagonal-shaped shaft are readily available and widely distributed in Japan.

Derived terms

• curetter
• microcurette

 

Translations

surgical instrument used for cleaning tissue

• Arabic: مِجْرَفة f (mijrafa), مِكْشَطة f (mikšaṭa)
• Catalan: cureta f, cullereta (ca) f
• Dutch: curette (nl) f
• Estonian: kürett
• Finnish: kaavin (fi), kyretti (fi)
• French: curette (fr) f
• German: Kürette (de) f
• Greek: ξέστρο (el) n (xéstro)
• Ido: kureto (io)
• Indonesian: kuret (id)
• Italian: curette f
• Macedonian: кирета f (kireta)
• Portuguese: cureta (pt) f
• Russian: кюре́тка (ru) f (kjurétka)
• Spanish: legra (es) f

The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.

Translations to be checked

• Chinese:

  Mandarin: ^{(please verify)} 刮匙 (zh), ^{(please verify)} 耳挖 (zh) (ěrwā), ^{(please verify)} 用刮匙刮

Verb

curette (third-person singular simple present curettes, present participle curetting, simple past and past participle curetted)

2. (transitive, medicine) To scrape with a curette.

Translations

to scrape with a curette

• Finnish: kaapia (fi)
• Polish: łyżeczkować impf
• Portuguese: curetar (pt)
• Spanish: legrar (es)

French

Noun

curette f (plural curettes)

1. curette

Further reading

• “curette”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.