the.com/rib cage

means The curved basket of bones around your chest that shields your heart and lungs while letting them move as you breathe.

from Straightforward compound: 'rib' traces back to Old English 'ribb,' a very old Germanic word for those curved bones (it even shares a root with German 'Rippe'), paired with 'cage,' borrowed from Old French 'cage' meaning enclosure, itself from Latin 'cavea' — a hollow place, the same root that gives us 'cave' and the cages that hold birds. Put together, the phrase is a 19th-century-style plain-description coinage: bones shaped like bars, arranged like a cage.