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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
coffin
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
wooden
▪ Forty-two extended inhumations, several with wooden coffins, were examined, 14 in the northern and 28 in the southern plot.
▪ The deceased were placed in wooden coffins or wrapped in felt.
▪ But, through a tawdry heap of bushes, he watched the procession and the bare wooden coffin lifted by altar boys.
▪ Grave gifts were typically pots, and traces of wooden coffins have been discovered.
■ NOUN
lead
▪ Not all lead coffins destined for vaults were provided with outer wooden cases.
▪ Perhaps, like the lead coffin of Osiris, which suffered a similar fate, it is the real secret of alchemy.
lid
▪ Helen remembered the posy of flowers from the garden that she had tried to fix to the coffin lid with sellotape.
▪ When my father threw in the first handful of dirt, I heard the pebbles dance on the coffin lid.
▪ As the drumming built to a crescendo, the coffin lid snapped open, scattering coins into the dust.
▪ Some of them dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs, others stared very seriously at the coffin lid.
▪ The sound was as final as the closing of a coffin lid.
■ VERB
bury
▪ When the corpse arrived at Grinton churchyard it was buried without a coffin in a linen shroud.
▪ Although it had been buried without a coffin, it was found perfectly preserved.
carry
▪ Following him were four men carrying a coffin.
▪ I carried the coffin of Cesar Chavez.
▪ I asked McCluskey and four of his men to join me in carrying the coffin out.
▪ The youngest, Benny, although only thirteen, walked with his brothers, carrying the coffin.
▪ The pair turned on him after he spotted them carrying the coffin through High Wycombe, Bucks, at midnight.
▪ The undertaker then takes over, makes up our faces and carries the coffin to the crematorium.
▪ Flash back colleagues carry Wayne Edwards' coffin at his funeral in January.
lay
▪ We laid him in his coffin on the spare-room bed.
▪ For many years she lay in the coffin, but strangely remained as lovely as if she were still alive.
▪ The body is laid out in a coffin resting on a bed of bran or sawdust.
▪ The six-foot metal cylinders that breathed for patients lay like coffins on stands that raised them to table height.
▪ On the raised dais in front of him lay Sylvie's coffin.
▪ To me Hugh lay in his coffin.
▪ Beria therefore had a vital interest in seeing Stalin laid into a coffin, and there were rumours that he murdered him.
▪ She took me into the first-floor front room, where my father had already been laid out in his coffin.
lie
▪ On the raised dais in front of him lay Sylvie's coffin.
▪ For many years she lay in the coffin, but strangely remained as lovely as if she were still alive.
▪ To me Hugh lay in his coffin.
▪ Their withered skeletal bodies lie in half-opened coffins beneath sheets of glass.
▪ We bury our noblemen there, except that they have to lie at present without coffins.
▪ The six-foot metal cylinders that breathed for patients lay like coffins on stands that raised them to table height.
▪ Seeing him lying in a coffin with a stake through his heart might go some way to convince me.
▪ On the morning of the funeral, he gave her a last farewell kiss as she lay in her coffin.
lower
▪ I wept when they lowered her coffin into the ground.
▪ I watched the men lower the coffin into the ground and watched them draw their earth-stained ropes up again.
open
▪ Some parents discover the truth by opening the sealed coffins delivered to them for burial.
▪ The grave was opened and her coffin was placed upon that of her husband.
place
▪ They saw little point in diagnosis after the patient had been placed in the coffin.
▪ The body was reclothed in a fresh habit and was placed in a new coffin.
▪ The deceased were placed in wooden coffins or wrapped in felt.
put
▪ In this way the body was put into the coffin wearing just a shift and bonnet.
▪ South Carolina put him in his coffin.
▪ They even put him in the coffin and shipped him home instead of leaving it to a local undertaker.
▪ In fact she was at that moment being put in her coffin at the workhouse, but he did not know that.
seal
▪ Some parents discover the truth by opening the sealed coffins delivered to them for burial.
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
nail in sb's/sth's coffin
▪ A final nail in the coffin had been hammered in by Wrede.
▪ Another loss would be another nail in Branfoots managerial coffin.
▪ For me this was the final nail in the coffin of a terminally dull product.
▪ In the end, it was also the issue which secured a vital nail in the coffin of Britain's nuclear dream.
▪ Industry observers fear that this would be another nail in the coffin of the independent record industry.
▪ It also is one more nail in the coffin of formal decor.
▪ It is another nail in the coffin of deterrence even if the first generation of cruise will be slow for such a role.
▪ Was not the film's very name, Last Resort, another nail in Margate's coffin?
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A large estate car or van will be needed to transport the coffin, and four to six people to carry it.
▪ And the heart-rending tragedy of the tiny coffins of a family of victims?
▪ By the 1770s the winding-sheet had almost disappeared, to be replaced by coffin sheets.
▪ His aging friends felt as if they were looking into their own open coffins.
▪ His imperious father tells Alex he wishes it were him in the coffin.
▪ Of course, I thought, it's the ashes of the coffin as well, so it would be quite a weight.
▪ On the way past the coffin Margaret bowed and kissed the lid.
▪ Sons of louts grappled with the coffin in vain; they could neither cram it in nor twist it out.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Coffin

Coffin \Cof"fin\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Coffined; p. pr. & vb. n. Coffining.] To inclose in, or as in, a coffin.

Would'st thou have laughed, had I come coffined home?
--Shak.

Devotion is not coffined in a cell.
--John Hall (1646).

Coffin

Coffin \Cof"fin\ (?; 115), n. [OE., a basket, receptacle, OF. cofin, fr. L. cophinus. See Coffer, n.]

  1. The case in which a dead human body is inclosed for burial.

    They embalmed him [Joseph], and he was put in a coffin.
    --Gen. 1. 26.

  2. A basket. [Obs.]
    --Wyclif (matt. xiv. 20).

  3. A casing or crust, or a mold, of pastry, as for a pie.

    Of the paste a coffin I will rear.
    --Shak.

  4. A conical paper bag, used by grocers. [Obs.]
    --Nares.

  5. (Far.) The hollow crust or hoof of a horse's foot, below the coronet, in which is the coffin bone.

    Coffin bone, the foot bone of the horse and allied animals, inclosed within the hoof, and corresponding to the third phalanx of the middle finger, or toe, of most mammals.

    Coffin joint, the joint next above the coffin bone.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
coffin

early 14c., "chest or box for valuables," from Old French cofin "sarcophagus," earlier "basket, coffer" (12c., Modern French coffin), from Latin cophinus "basket, hamper" (source of Italian cafano, Spanish cuebano "basket"), from Greek kophinos "a basket," which is of uncertain origin.\n

\nFuneral sense in English is 1520s; before that it was the literal Latin one and had also a meaning of "pie crust" (late 14c.). Meaning "vehicle regarded as unsafe" is from 1830s. Coffin nail "cigarette" is slang from 1880; nail in (one's) coffin "thing that contributes to one's death" is from 1792.

Wiktionary
coffin

n. 1 An oblong closed box in which a dead person is bury. 2 (context obsolete English) A basket. 3 A casing or crust, or a mold, of pastry, as for a pie. 4 (context obsolete English) A conical paper bag, used by grocers. 5 The hollow crust or hoof of a horse's foot, below the coronet, in which is the coffin bone. vb. (context transitive English) To place in a coffin.

WordNet
coffin

n. box in which a corpse is buried or cremated [syn: casket]

coffin

v. place into a coffin; "her body was coffined"

Wikipedia
Coffin

A coffin is a funerary box used for viewing or keeping a corpse, either for burial or cremation.

The word took two different paths, cofin in Old French originally meaning basket, became coffin in English and became couffin in modern French which nowadays means a cradle. A distinction is often made between coffin and casket: the latter is generally understood to denote a four-sided (almost always rectangular) funerary box, while a coffin is usually six sided. However, coffins having a one-piece side with a curve at the shoulder instead of a join are more commonly used in the United Kingdom (UK).

Coffin (surname)

Coffin is an Anglo-Norman surname.

The House of Coffin is an ancient English family which originated in Normandy, France. The Coffins have held a number of manors, the most notable of which is Portledge in Devon, England, which they held for over nine centuries. The progenitor of the American Coffins was Tristram Coffin, a Royalist, who came to Massachusetts from Devonshire in 1642. He was the original proprietor of Nantucket. The American branch is one of the Boston Brahmin, a group of elite families based in and around Boston. Many American Coffins are or were Quakers.

Coffin (whaling family)

The Coffin family were a group of whalers operating out of Nantucket, Massachusetts from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Some members of the family gained wider exposure due to their discovery of various islands in the Pacific Ocean.

Coffin (disambiguation)

Coffin is a box for interring a corpse.

Coffin may refer to:

  • Coffin (surname)
  • The Coffin, 2008 Thai horror film
  • Coffin (2011 film), 2011 horror film
  • Coffin (whaling family), a historic group of Nantucket whalers
  • "Coffin" (song), a song by Black Veil Brides
Coffin (film)

Coffin is a 2011 thriller film starring Kevin Sorbo and Bruce Davison.

Usage examples of "coffin".

The tomb is recessed in the wall of the aisle, and consists of a lower storey for the coffin with a flat top, with a front of open stone work in eight divisions, each containing a quatrefoil.

Though Ther-midorian stories of sans-culottes playing skittles with the bones of the Valois and the Bourbons were probably apocryphal, a painting by Hubert Robert, that connoisseur of ruins, certainly shows coffins being lifted from their graves and stones being overturned and removed.

He then recounted to Arabin once more how he had been chased by men with coffins, and likewise how effectually he had done up one of his pursuers.

I have had, and am making up a boquet for each one, of the flowers I remember best on those days, in order that you and George may put them in my coffin.

The tumult of luxury entertained him: the blasts of chypre from the birds, the hissing farthingales and Hainault lace, the net stockings and gem stuck pumps, the headdresses starched and spangled and meshed and fluted, the plucked eyebrows and frizzled hair, the lynx, genet and Calabrian sable stinking in the wet, the gauzy cache-nez drawn over nose and chin in the gardens and referred to in the careless vulgarity of the mode as coffins a roupies.

He flinched as a frothing comber approached but it went by and over it and when the wave had gone the coffin had vanished.

To human eyes, a Calvin cycler was a shiny metal coffin built for a minivan: to the botfly it was a muted tangle of EM emissions.

He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, opened the datacom, snapped it immediately shut, and then, at last, opened it once more, gingerly, as though lifting the lid on a coffin.

There, in the coffin lay no longer the foul Thing that we had so dreaded and grown to hate that the work of her destruction was yielded as a privilege to the one best entitled to it, but Lucy as we had seen her in life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity.

His embarkation was clandestine: and, if we may credit a tale of the princess Anne, he passed the hostile sea closely secreted in a coffin.

The three portly-looking gentlemen whose grog-blossomed visages speak their love of the good things of this world are the Admirals Scott and Hope, and that facetious of all funny senators, Sir Isaac Coffin.

Mademoiselle de Fontanges lay in her coffin, recovering from her confinement.

Gloria caught a glimpse of honey-varnished wood and yellow freesias as the coffin slid between black jackets into the open back.

He looks down into her grave and watches the yellow freesias on the lid of her coffin disappear under the red soil.

We walk through the godown to the back, where there is a narrow iron stair, and up above the lights he opens a door on a room like a coffin, a little more than a meter high, the same wide.