belemnite

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“
Fossils of belemnite, cockles (cardium), and lamp-shells (terebratula) have been found in the chalk, and numerous echini, with the pentagon star on their base, are picked up in the gravels and called by the country people Shepherds 'Crowns -- or even fossil toads.

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Definitions (6)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. noun A cone-shaped, fossilized internal shell of any of an extinct genus of cephalopods related to the cuttlefish.

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Toggle GNU Webster definitions GNU Webster's 1913 (1)

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Examples (21)

  • Families hand down the miraculous stones from father to son as a precious legacy; and mothers hang them on their children's necks side by side with medals of saints and madonnas, which themselves are hardly so highly prized as the stones that fall from heaven Another and very different form of thunderbolt is the belemnite, a common English fossil often preserved in houses in the west country with the same superstitious reverence as the neolithic hatchets. —  Falling in Love With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
  • At the present day, when all our girls go to Girton and enter for the classical tripos, I need hardly translate the word belemnite 'for the benefit of the ladies,' as people used to do in the dark and unemancipated eighteenth century; but as our boys have left off learning Greek just as their sisters are beginning to act the 'Antigone' at private theatricals, I may perhaps be pardoned if I explain, 'for the benefit of the gentlemen,' that the word is practically equivalent to javelin-fossil. —  Falling in Love With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
  • In Shakespeare's country their connection with thunder is well known, so that in all probability a belemnite is the original of the beautiful lines in 'Cymbeline Fear no more the lightning flash Nor the all-dreaded thunder stone where the distinction between the lightning and the thunderbolt is particularly well indicated. —  Falling in Love With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
  • Indeed, I have had two thunderbolts shown me at once, one of which was a large belemnite, and the other a modern Indian tomahawk. —  Falling in Love With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
  • Fossils of belemnite, cockles (cardium), and lamp-shells (terebratula) have been found in the chalk, and numerous echini, with the pentagon star on their base, are picked up in the gravels and called by the country people Shepherds' Crowns--or even fossil toads. —  John Keble's Parishes
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Etymologies (2)

Toggle American Heritage etymologies American Heritage Dictionary (1)

  1. New Latin belemnītēs, from Greek belemnon, dart; see gwelə- in Indo-European roots.

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. = French belemnite, from New Latin belemnites, from Greek βέλεμνον, poetical for βέλος, a dart, missile (from βάλλειν, throw, cast), + -ites.
 

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/bɛˈlɛmnaɪt/
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