claviform

1. (palaeography) An image or symbol which is club-shaped, that is, larger at the tip than at the base.Examples: "The claviform comprises a vertical line with a bulge at one side; but unlike the buttocks on the stylized females, the bulge is usually on the middle or the upper half of the 'sign'! It has been suggested that the 'upper bulge' on a claviform instead represents breasts, but this is based on supposedly stylized statuettes from Dolni Vestonice and elsewhere, comprising a rod with two little lumps near the top, and thus on analogies with sites even further away in space and time from the claviforms."; "In the early days of research, the images were often read very literally, and this was certainly taken to extremes – the classic example, of course, is the ‘signs’ in Ice Age cave art which the first researchers assumed to represent actual objects, and gave them names accordingly – for example, ‘claviforms’ were thought to be clubs, ‘tectiforms’ were thought to be roofs or huts, and so forth [...]."; "There is also a faded red painting of a claviform (a thick curved line with a raised bump or point in the middle) that looks awfully similar to those found at a few other sites in northern Spain. A claviform from Altamira was dated using the uranium-series technique and is at least 35,000 years old."

1. (chiefly biology) Shaped like a nail (“a metallic spike-shaped fastener”).Examples: "CLAVOPORA Busk, 1874. Colony small, erect, coriaceous, claviform (nail-shaped), with two well differentiated parts: [...]"