postérieurs

Postérieurs is the plural form of postérieur, a French term meaning "behind" or "posterior." The root is Latin posterus, from which the English adjective posterior derives. In practice, postérieurs is used in French to describe the rear part of an organism or structure. When translated or used in English, the corresponding terms are posterior (adjective) and posteriors (plural noun) in specialized contexts, or hind/rear in everyday language.

In anatomy and medicine, postérieur denotes the rear aspect of the body or of a limb. French texts may refer to les muscles postérieurs (posterior muscles) or to le postérieur (the buttocks). The combining form postero- is used to form directional terms such as posteroanterior (back-to-front) or posterosuperior (behind and above).

In zoology and related fields, postérieurs can describe the hind limbs or other rear structures of animals; in quadrupeds, les membres postérieurs denote the hind legs.

In statistics and data science, posteriors (the plural of posterior distribution) are the probability distributions of model parameters after observing data, a central concept in Bayesian inference.

The term is largely specialized; outside French-language literature, English texts typically use posterior, hind, or rear rather than postérieurs except in direct translation.