cuttlefish
Americannoun
-
cuttlefish,
plural
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cuttlefishes
plural
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of cuttlefish
1400–50; late Middle English codel, Old English cudele cuttlefish + fish
Vocabulary lists containing cuttlefish
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.
See Examples For:
"This year, they were all really skittish... hiding under rocks. Because there's so few cuttlefish hanging out at the moment, they don't have strength in numbers."
From BBC ● Aug. 29, 2026
Official figures released this month estimate just 1,811 cuttlefish turned up to mate this year, down from 63,000 last year - a 97% drop.
From BBC ● Aug. 29, 2026
A spokesperson for South Australia's Department of Primary Industries and Regions said cuttlefish populations "naturally fluctuate" depending on environmental conditions.
From BBC ● Aug. 29, 2026
This structure varies widely, from the rounded cuttlebone in cuttlefish to the thin, blade-like gladius in many squid, as well as the spiral shell of the ram's horn squid.
From Science Daily ● Apr. 1, 2026
Of descriptions, properly so called, there are few,—those of the elephant, the camel, the bonasus, the crocodile, the chameleon, the cuckoo, the cuttlefish, and a few others, being all that we find.
From Lives of Eminent Zoologists, from Aristotle to Linnæus with Introductory remarks on the Study of Natural History by William MacGillivray
Roger Hanlon of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and his colleagues recently discovered that cuttlefishes actively express opsin genes throughout their skin, particularly in their fins and underbellies.
From Scientific American ● Aug. 20, 2012
Presumably the octopus and cuttlefish employ the same method of self-defense; they are not the only ones: Extremely sly and subtle fishes Are octopi or cuttlefishes.
From Time Magazine Archive
Also very notable was the abundance of predatory cuttlefishes, the bullies of the ancient seas.
From The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) A Plain Story Simply Told by J. Arthur Thomson
At one of these we ordered a seadinner—crabs, cuttlefishes, soles, and turbots—which we ate at a table in the open air.
From Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, First Series by Horatio Robert Forbes Brown
At one of these we ordered a sea-dinner—crabs, cuttlefishes, soles, and turbots—which we ate at a table in the open air.
From New Italian sketches by John Addington Symonds
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.
