Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Any of various predatory marine gastropods of the family Muricidae, having rough spiny shells and including several species formerly used to produce the dye Tyrian purple.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A shell used as a trumpet, as in representations of tritons, in art.
- noun . [capitalized] The typical genus of Mùricidæ.
- noun A species of this genus.
- noun Pl. murexes or murices (-rek-sez,-ri-sēz). A caltrop.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- proper noun (Zoöl.) A genus of marine gastropods, having rough, and frequently spinose, shells, which are often highly colored inside; the rock shells. They abound in tropical seas.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Any of the
genus Murex ofmarine gastropods .
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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Is this indeed the "murex," as Browning calls it, of the Tyrian purple, which can be found on the Minehead rocks at low-tide by the holiday-makers of our day?
Lynton and Lynmouth A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland F. J. Widgery
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The whole verse of course begins to explain itself, if we know the meaning of the word "murex," which is the name of a sea-shell, out of which was made the celebrated blue dye of Tyre.
Robert Browning 1905
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"The 'murex' contains a dye of miraculous beauty; and this once extracted and bottled, Hobbs, Nobbs, and Co. may trade in it and feast; but the poet who (figuratively) brought the murex to land, and created its value, may, as Keats probably did, eat porridge all his life."
A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) Sutherland Orr 1865
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These wide-ranging traders were especially known for trafficking in the cedars of Lebanon from the coastal mountains of their homeland and a rare purple dye derived from the murex shells of the Lebanese coast.
Alexander the Great Philip Freeman 2011
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I can think of a lot of pink in nature: the inside of a white murex shell is pink.
The Pink Dress 2009
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The Phoenicians were the pioneers in the seventh century BC, scouting for the imperial purple dye found in the murex sea snails of the Moroccan coast.
Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester – review Kevin Rushby 2010
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These wide-ranging traders were especially known for trafficking in the cedars of Lebanon from the coastal mountains of their homeland and a rare purple dye derived from the murex shells of the Lebanese coast.
Alexander the Great Philip Freeman 2011
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These wide-ranging traders were especially known for trafficking in the cedars of Lebanon from the coastal mountains of their homeland and a rare purple dye derived from the murex shells of the Lebanese coast.
Alexander the Great Philip Freeman 2011
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I wish I could get royal purple not amythyst, not murex purple — real royal purple seed beads.
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Best to Corcyra go for cuttle-fish, for the acarne and the fat sea-skull the purple-fish, the little murex too, mice of the sea and the sea-urchin sweet.
The Defense Apuleius 2008
colleen commented on the word murex
The port city of Tyre was the ancient capital of Phoenicia and was best known for the production of purple dye extracted from the murex sea snail.
- National Geographic
May 17, 2007
yaybob commented on the word murex
Genus of tropical sea snail from which a purple dye is derived
December 11, 2008