coffin

• cophin (archaic)

coffins

From Middle English cofin, from Old Northern French cofin (“sarcophagus", earlier "basket, coffer”), from Latin cophinus (“basket”), a loanword from Ancient Greek κόφινος (kóphinos, “a basket”).

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈkɒfɪn/
• (US) IPA^(key): /ˈkɔfɪn/
• (US, cot–caught merger, Canada) IPA^(key): /ˈkɑfɪn/

• Audio (US)

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• Rhymes: -ɒfɪn
• Rhymes: -ɒfən

coffin (plural coffins)

1. A rectangular closed box in which the body of a dead person is placed for burial.
   • 20 May 2018, Hadley Freeman in The Guardian, Is Meghan Markle the American the royals have needed all along?

     I’d always found the royals a cold proposition, Diana excepted, but the sight of that little boy, his head bent, not daring to look up at his mother’s coffin in front of him was, and remains, genuinely heartbreaking.

2. (cartomancy) The eighth Lenormand card.
3. (obsolete) A basket.
   • Wycliffe's Bible (Matthew 14:20)

     And all ate, and were filled. And they took the reliefs of broken gobbets, twelve coffins full.

4. (archaic) A casing or crust, or a mold, of pastry, as for a pie.
   • Shakespeare

     Of the paste a coffin I will rear.

   • 1596, The Good Huswife's Jewell

     Take your mallard and put him into the iuyce of the sayde Onyons, and season him with pepper, and salte, cloues and mace, then put your Mallard into the coffin with the saide iuyce of the onyons.

5. (obsolete) A conical paper bag, used by grocers.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Nares to this entry?)

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

The type of coffin with upholstery and a half-open lid (mostly in the United States) is called a casket.

• casket (US)

coffin (third-person singular simple present coffins, present participle coffining, simple past and past participle coffined)

1. (transitive) To place in a coffin.
   • 1941, Emily Carr, chapter 19, in Klee Wyck‎:

     Indians do not hinder the progress of their dead by embalming or tight coffining.

   • 2007, Barbara Everett, "Making and Breaking in Shakespeare's Romances," London Review of Books, 29:6, page 21:

     The chest in which she is coffined washes ashore and is brought to the Lord Cerimon.

• encoffin