Spot the Frippet: something penannular.

Annular means ring-shaped, and penannular means almost ring-shaped.

These two Celtic brooches, for instance, are penannular:


photo by Anna Booth.

Or, much easier to spot, so are many earrings:


These are Egyptian, from around 1500BC. They're in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Um...the Ancient Egyptians didn't actually have three ears, did they?

You might see a penannular pattern on some bracket fungus:


photo by Dinesh Valke from Thane, India

or a pennanular key-ring, or a jar-opener:


photo by Horatio Snickers. If there really can be anyone in the world called Horatio Snickers.

You might spot a coiled penannular caterpillar:


paper kite caterpillar

 or you could just take a big bite out of a doughnut.

Or, make things really very easy indeed, you could even try to find a nice curly example of the letter in the Roman alphabet that comes between b and d.

Hmm...I think we can all claim 100% success rate on this one.

Spot the Frippet: something penannular. The pen bit comes from the Latin paene, which means almost. Annular comes from the other Latin word annulus, which means ring.