How many letters is the answer to "cuticle"?

Anything from 5 to 9. The length with the most candidates is 6. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.

Crossword clue

Cuticle crossword clue

7 words in our dictionary can answer the crossword clue "cuticle", from 5 letters up to 9, grouped below by the length of your slot.

Written by Blake Boege

Answers by length

5 different lengths answer this one. Yours is whichever row matches the squares in the grid.

Letters	Answers
5	shell
6	shield mantle
7	pallium
8	carapace cuticula
9	epidermis

What this list looks like

4 of these mean the same as the clue and 3 are kinds of it, which is a distinction worth holding on to when two look equally good.

Which one does the setter mean?

Five squares is SHELL and six is SHIELD or MANTLE, so this clue is decided almost entirely by crossings. If the puzzle leans anatomical, the nine-letter EPIDERMIS is the outer layer of skin and the likeliest long answer.

How these differ

Cuticle means a thin outer covering and the answers come from three different fields. In human anatomy it is the strip of dead skin at the base of a nail, and more broadly the EPIDERMIS. In entomology, CUTICULA and CARAPACE are the hard outer layer of an insect or crustacean, the carapace specifically the shell over the back. In botany it is the waxy film on a leaf. SHELL, SHIELD, MANTLE and PALLIUM are the general words for a covering, PALLIUM being the Latin cloak and also, confusingly, part of the brain.

Still stuck? Filter by the letters you have

Got a crossing letter? The word finder searches the same dictionary as this page, with a box for the first letter, the last, and anything in between.

Where these answers come from

These came out of a dictionary. Every word above is recorded by WordNet as meaning “cuticle” or as naming a kind of it, and each one is in the 173,000-wordlist this site searches. We hold no newspaper's answer key and reproduce no published crossword.

Common questions

What is the answer to the crossword clue "cuticle"?: There is more than one. 7 words in our dictionary fit this clue, and which one a puzzle wants depends on the length of the slot and the crossing letters. Five squares is SHELL and six is SHIELD or MANTLE, so this clue is decided almost entirely by crossings. If the puzzle leans anatomical, the nine-letter EPIDERMIS is the outer layer of skin and the likeliest long answer.
How many letters is the answer to "cuticle"?: Anything from 5 to 9. The length with the most candidates is 6. Count the squares in your grid and read only that row of the table.