A cnidarian in its free-swimming stage. Medusas are bell-shaped, with tentacles hanging down around a central mouth. Jellyfish are medusas, while corals and sea anemones lack a medusa stage and exist only as polyps.
Compare polyp
1750–60; special use of Medusa, alluding to the Gorgon's snaky locks
< Latin < Greek Médousa, special use of médousa, feminine of médōn ruling
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A jellyfish begins its life cycle as an anemone-like creature on the sea floor before undergoing a metamorphosis and sprouting into a recognizable medusa — that Pacman ghost shape we're all familiar with.
From Salon ● Aug. 2, 2023
Scientists prefer the term jelly or medusa over jellyfish because the creatures are not fish.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 25, 2022
Dr. Griffith knew that her disease, like cancer, was not one disease but many, a medusa of waving tentacles.
From New York Times ● Apr. 27, 2021
A black floor-length gown with undulating straps could have been a poisonous medusa, with coral-red dye bleeding down its multi-layered skirt.
From Washington Times ● Jan. 20, 2020
Then they have taken the form of a medusa.
From "The Thing About Jellyfish" by Ali Benjamin
Its bronze door bears a Medusa head, her open mouth turned into a letter slot.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 30, 2026
Syn proudly sent me a link to a US public warning about Medusa which was put out in March.
From BBC ● Sep. 29, 2025
Did you watch “Kaos,” the short-lived Netflix series from Charlie Covell that starred Jeff Goldblum as Zeus and Debi Mazar as Medusa?
From Los Angeles Times ● May 14, 2025
Looking at Medusa, the hideous woman with snakes for hair, might turn the viewer to stone, but there’s power in offending the eye—or at least rejecting the pressure to be decorative.
From Slate ● Oct. 28, 2024
I ran down corridors littered with bones, past rooms foil of sheepskin rugs and life-size cement sheep that I recognized as the work of Medusa.
From "The Sea of Monsters" by Rick Riordan
Wearing a toadstool headdress and a skirt embellished with Medusas, El Beh has one of the most striking looks — though the orange ram’s horns on Trebien Pollard are quite something, too.
From New York Times ● Jan. 23, 2022
Bruitparif has installed fifty Medusas in the metropolitan area, and will add many more this summer.
From The New Yorker ● May 6, 2019
The band's final two songs are I Am The King and Medusas "which sounds like it's a Greek myth but is actually about jelly fish".
From BBC ● Feb. 28, 2019
He wielded his clinical obligation like Perseus’s shield, in which a cavalcade of Medusas lost their stony power.
From The Guardian ● Sep. 4, 2015
I followed the hissing and spitting sounds of Medusas hair.
From "The Lightning Thief" by Rick Riordan
“I was able to actually collect some of those medusae last year during the bloom, but rearing gelatinous organisms is pretty difficult,” Stajner said.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 3, 2024
Before they adhere to the ocean’s surface, they live underwater as tiny creatures known as medusae, Wagner said.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 29, 2024
Although beached by-the-wind sailors die in great numbers, they most probably have already reproduced and left thousands of medusae in the sea, according to Wagner.
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 29, 2024
In the midst of this inextricable mass of plants and sea weed, I noticed some charming pink halcyons and actiniae, with their long tentacles trailing after them, and medusae, green, red, and blue.
From Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Verne, Jules
I also noticed large medusae floating between the reeds.
From Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Verne, Jules
The blue seafaring colonies are themselves asexual, though they bud off tiny transparent medusas that are thought to go to the deep sea and reproduce sexually there, Stajner said.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 3, 2024
Vivid hues that evoked the sea beds and headwear that resembled medusas continued the theme.
From Seattle Times ● Mar. 1, 2022
But not all marine lakes have medusas, the bell-shape organisms you probably think of when the word "jellyfish" comes to mind.
From National Geographic ● Feb. 28, 2018
There is menace, too, in the sea, which is teeming with nasty stinging jellyfish known as medusas.
From New York Times ● Jul. 10, 2016
She remembered having been in that lonely spot once before with Uros; she had seen the strand all covered with bloated bluish medusas, melting away in the sun.
From The Pobratim A Slav Novel by Jones, P.
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.
