octopus
Americannoun
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any octopod of the genus Octopus, having a soft, oval body and eight sucker-bearing arms, living mostly at the bottom of the sea.
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something likened to an octopus, as an organization with many forms of far-reaching influence or control.
noun
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any cephalopod mollusc of the genera Octopus, Eledone, etc, having a soft oval body with eight long suckered tentacles and occurring at the sea bottom: order Octopoda (octopods)
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a powerful influential organization with far-reaching effects, esp harmful ones
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another name for spider
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of octopus
1750–60; < New Latin < Greek oktṓpous (plural oktṓpodes ) eight-footed; see octo-, -pod
Explanation
An octopus is an eight-legged sea creature. Octopuses are intelligent animals, and have been shown to have great capacity for learning. (However, that doesn't stop people from grilling and eating them.) An octopus is a mollusk, which means it's a distant relation of slugs, snails, clams, and mussels. It's also a cephalopod, an animal with a large head and tentacles or arms. Of the other animals in these categories, octopuses are by far the smartest, and they're also incredibly flexible because of their lack of a skeleton or hard shell, which makes them able to squeeze through tiny spaces. The Greek root, oktopous, means "eight-foot."
Vocabulary lists containing octopus
Marine Biology - Introductory
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Marine Biology - Middle School
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Marine Biology - High School
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
The U.K. government has in recent weeks taken stakes in startups like Kraken—the technology arm of utility Octopus Energy—, self-driving car firm Wayve and quantum-computing company Oxford Quantum Circuits.
From The Wall Street Journal • Jun. 10, 2026
This fortune-telling exercise follows in the footsteps of South Africa's unforgettable Paul the Octopus in 2010.
From Barron's • Jun. 6, 2026
When Paul the Octopus predicted all of Germany's results correctly at the 2010 World Cup, he was hailed by the world as an oracle.
From BBC • May 26, 2026
“People We Meet on Vacation” “Six years after ‘My Octopus Teacher,’ we find there’s still much to learn from eight-limbed marine mollusks in ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures.’
From Los Angeles Times • May 21, 2026
“It looks like 2634 Octopus to me,” she read.
From "Book Scavenger" by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
