Having a sieve-like or perforated appearance with many small holes or pores.
From Latin 'cribrum' (sieve) + '-ate' (having the quality of). The Latin root comes from the practice of using sieves to separate grain, and the term was adopted into anatomical and botanical terminology to describe structures with sieve-like perforations.
This word appears frequently in anatomy textbooks describing bone structures—the cribriform plate in your nose is literally a sieve that lets smell signals pass through to your brain while keeping larger particles out!
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