sarcophagus

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. A stone coffin, often inscribed or decorated with sculpture.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A species of stone used among the Greeks for making coffins. It was called by the Romans lapis Assius, from being found at Assos, a city of the Troad.
2. n. A stone coffin, especially one ornamented with sculptures or bearing inscriptions, etc. Sarcophagi were in use from very early Egyptian and Oriental antiquity down to the fall of the Roman empire. Many Greek and Roman examples are magnificent in their rich carvings, and a few are of high importance as preserving in their decoration almost the chief remains of purely Greek painting in colors. Although now uncommon, they are sometimes used, especially for the burial of distinguished persons whose tombs are more or less monumental. See also cuts under bacchante and Etruscan.
3. n. A peculiar wine-cooler forming part of a dining-room sideboard about the end of the eighteenth century: it was a dark mahogany box, lined with lead.

Wiktionary

1. n. A stone coffin, often inscribed or decorated with sculpture.
2. n. informal The cement and steel structure that encases the destroyed reactor at the power station in Chernobyl, Ukraine.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. A species of limestone used among the Greeks for making coffins, which was so called because it consumed within a few weeks the flesh of bodies deposited in it. It is otherwise called lapis Assius, or Assian stone, and is said to have been found at Assos, a city of Lycia.
2. n. A coffin or chest-shaped tomb of the kind of stone described above; hence, any stone coffin.
3. n. A stone shaped like a sarcophagus and placed by a grave as a memorial.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a stone coffin (usually bearing sculpture or inscriptions)