Uh oh, I was just doing some drive-by voting when I happen to come across this one, and the linguist bit puts its hand up and says "ooh, ooh, miss, I know this one"; and the part with pudor says to just keep on driving and not draw attention to myself.

Okay. It's clitorides (and someone had already done that under that node), stressed on the O. It's from Greek κλειτορις kleitorís, third declension feminine, plural kleitorides. So in Latin this becomes clitoris, plural clitorides, and strictly the first vowel should have been long as in climax.

(Of course, as it's English we're speaking you should just go and use the English plural clitorises.)

There were Greek words kleitoriazein and kleitorizein 'to touch the clitoris', which could usefully be borrowed into English as 'to clitorize'. A good classical word, don't be afraid to use it. Or do it.

The genitive is therefore clitoridis. I mention this because one dictionary has a mistake in it -- I think it was Chambers, but I can't find the entry now -- but it was made by false analogy: since the Latin genitive of penis is penis, you would say os penis 'bone of the penis', which actually exists in non-humans. So by analogy they say the bone of the clitoris is the os clitoris when of course it would really be os clitoridis, and I know I'm starting to get silly talking about bones, it wasn't bone, it was... it was something they both have...

And yes I know this is getting... anal retentive can't be right, either... in this context... fixated? Yes, I think fixated just about covers it. You can go now, I've finished.
