In animal anatomy, the mouth is the first portion of the alimentary canal that receives food.
Some animal phyla, including vertebrates, have a complete digestive system, with a mouth at one end and an anus at the other. Which end forms first in ontogeny is a criterion used to classify animals into protostome and deuterostome. The first space of the mouth is the mouth cavity, bounded laterally and in front by the alveolar arches (containing the teeth), and posteriorly by the isthmus of the fauces.
Read more about Mouth: In Human Anatomy
Famous quotes containing the word mouth:
“The variables are surprisingly few.... One can whip or be whipped; one can eat excrement or quaff urine; mouth and private part can be meet in this or that commerce. After which there is the gray of morning and the sour knowledge that things have remained fairly generally the same since man first met goat and woman.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you—trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and as I may say, the whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“May Allah keep her
And other wives from me. But this young slave
For the Caliph? Well, only her thin mouth to save
My soul I can’t forget, nor her slack eyes:
The oasis of age is sand and lies.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)