octopus
Americannoun
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octopuses,
plural
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octopi
plural
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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.
See Examples For:
Phishing scams are like an octopus: They have many sticky tentacles.
From MarketWatch ● Jul. 14, 2026
Increasing numbers of octopus may offer a new market for fishermen, for example, but can hit populations of crabs, lobster, scallops and other shellfish on which they prey.
From BBC ● Jul. 7, 2026
Cool-adapted species such as cod are generally moving further north, while numbers of some warm-water species such as octopus have risen around south-west England.
From BBC ● Jul. 7, 2026
Using the ROV, the team collected the octopus specimen and also recorded video footage of two others that appeared to be the same species.
From Science Daily ● May 25, 2026
A chunk of rock seemed to melt, and the octopus reappeared.
From "The Wild Robot Protects" by Peter Brown
That outer shell is built largely from chitin, a tough natural material also found in fungal cell walls, fish scales, and the beaks of squids and octopi.
From Science Daily ● May 9, 2026
Jewish people were sometimes depicted as octopi in Nazi posters during World War Two.
From BBC ● Mar. 6, 2024
“Some people were turned off by the violence or the octopi scene and felt ‘Oldboy’ was too much of a genre film for competition,” he says.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 16, 2023
Red Wings faithful throw live and dead octopi on the ice to salute three-goal games, and Nashville Predators fans toss catfish.
From Seattle Times ● Nov. 5, 2021
Trucks carry off skeletons and meteorites and octopi in jars and herbarium sheets and Egyptian gold and South African ivory and Permian fossils.
From "All the Light We Cannot See" by Anthony Doerr
Perhaps the most impressive discoveries are animal “cities,” including two assemblies of octopuses, dubbed Octopolis and Octlantis, found off the east coast of Australia.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 19, 2026
Some octopuses even climbed over the side of the box to reach the location of the projected image rather than swimming around it.
From Science Daily ● Jun. 5, 2026
"These are little octopuses that live in the deep sea, and hardly anybody on Earth has ever gotten to see them. I just feel lucky that I got to work with them," says Voight.
From Science Daily ● May 25, 2026
The fossils extend the earliest known record of finned octopuses by about 15 million years and push back the broader octopus timeline by around 5 million years.
From Science Daily ● Apr. 25, 2026
Cressie crocheted four eight-legged octopuses out of various colors of yarn to sit on the bed.
From "The Secret Life of Bees" by Sue Monk Kidd
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.
