Coffin
name, noun, verb ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A closed box in which the body of a dead person is placed for burial.
"[…] Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards, / Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave, / Night and day journeys a coffin."
- 2 An exploratory trench used when first digging a mine. Cornwall, obsolete
- 3 box in which a corpse is buried or cremated wordnet
- 4 The eighth Lenormand card.
- 5 A deep ditch. Cornwall, broadly
Show 5 more definitions
- 6 A casing or crust, or a mold, of pastry, as for a pie. archaic
"Of the paste a coffin I will rear."
- 7 A conical paper bag, used by grocers. obsolete
"The smoke of this Hearbe, which they receaue at the mouth through certaine coffins, suche as the Grocers do vse to put in their Spices."
- 8 The hollow crust or hoof of a horse's foot, below the coronet, in which is the coffin bone.
- 9 A storage container for nuclear waste.
- 10 A combination fence obstacle where the horse jumps a set of rails, strides downhill to a ditch, and then goes back uphill to another jump.
- 1 To place in a coffin. transitive
"Indians do not hinder the progress of their dead by embalming or tight coffining."
- 2 place into a coffin wordnet
- 1 A surname.
Example
More examples"With heads respectfully bowed, they carried the coffin up the steps and into the small chapel."
Etymology
From Middle English coffyn, from Old Northern French cofin (“sarcophagus", earlier "basket, coffer”), from Latin cophinus (“basket”), a loanword from Ancient Greek κόφινος (kóphinos, “a basket”). Doublet of coffer.
Borrowed from Cornish koghyn (“exploratory trench”), with spelling likely influenced by etymology 1.
Related phrases
More for "coffin"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.