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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

coffin.

A closed box in which the body of a dead person is placed for burial.

6 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

noun/ˈkɒfɪn/Received-Pronunciation/ˈkɔfɪn/US/ˈkɑfɪn/cot-caught-merger
  1. A closed box in which the body of a dead person is placed for burial.

  2. The eighth Lenormand card.

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

    archaic
  4. A conical paper bag, used by grocers.

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

  6. A storage container for nuclear waste.

  7. 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.

Where this word comes from

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. Displaced native Old English þrūh.

verb/ˈkɒfɪn/Received-Pronunciation/ˈkɔfɪn/US/ˈkɑfɪn/cot-caught-merger
  1. To place in a coffin.

    transitive
Where this word comes from

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. Displaced native Old English þrūh.

noun/ˈkɒfɪn/Received-Pronunciation/ˈkɔfɪn/US/ˈkɑfɪn/cot-caught-merger
  1. An exploratory trench used when first digging a mine.

    Cornwall · obsolete
  2. A deep ditch.

    Cornwall · broadly
Where this word comes from

Borrowed from Cornish koghyn (“exploratory trench”), with spelling likely influenced by etymology 1.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.