mollusc

British

/ ˈmɒləsk /

noun

any invertebrate of the phylum Mollusca, having a soft unsegmented body and often a shell, secreted by a fold of skin (the mantle). The group includes the gastropods (snails, slugs, etc), bivalves (clams, mussels, etc), and cephalopods (cuttlefish, octopuses, etc)

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Other Word Forms

Etymology

Origin of mollusc

C18: via New Latin from Latin molluscus, from mollis soft

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:

mollusc

"One of the reasons I'm interested in these snails is because they're so beautiful," explained evolutionary geneticist and mollusc expert Prof Angus Davison from the University of Nottingham.

From BBC ● Aug. 3, 2025

Scientists photographed and filmed what looked like fields of marine life - dominated by various different types of tube worm and mollusc.

From BBC ● Jul. 30, 2025

Chemically speaking, its formation begins with a mollusc extracting calcium and carbonate ions from water.

From Science Daily ● Jan. 12, 2024

“And I’ve got to say,” she says, “a mollusc is a nice companion.”

From The Guardian ● Nov. 17, 2020

This circlet of gill-lamellae led Cuvier to class the limpets as Cyclobranchiata, and, by erroneous identification of them with the series of metamerically repeated ctenidia of Chiton, to associate the latter mollusc with the former.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 11, Slice 5 "Gassendi, Pierre" to "Geocentric" by Various

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023