nautilus
Americannoun
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Also called chambered nautilus, pearly nautilus. any cephalopod of the genus Nautilus, having a spiral, chambered shell with pearly septa.
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(initial capital letter) the first nuclear-powered submarine launched by the U.S. Navy.
noun
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any cephalopod mollusc of the genus Nautilus, esp the pearly nautilus
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short for paper nautilus
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of nautilus
1595–1605; < Latin < Greek nautílos paper nautilus, literally, sailor, derivative of naûs ship; the webbed dorsal arms of the paper nautilus were thought to have been used as sails
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:
Agnoli, who worked as a carpenter prior to entering architecture, used long spans of wood to create massive trusses and spiraling nautilus shapesand formed brick into catenary arches.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 6, 2025
The results suggest nautilus shells, orderly yet beguilingly sinuous.
From Washington Post ● Feb. 24, 2023
The storm had twisted the structure's metal roof like a nautilus shell and rolled it out into the street.
From Salon ● Feb. 23, 2023
The last common ancestor of most cephalopods likely had a chambered, pearly shell, not unlike the iconic one worn by the nautilus, a shelled cephalopod that survives to this day.
From New York Times ● Nov. 5, 2022
My walls are decorated with images of the Fibonacci spiral in nature: flower petals, pinecones, nautilus shells, far-off galaxies.
From "The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl" by Stacy McAnulty
These shells may have been those of nautili.
From Essays on early ornithology and kindred subjects by McClymont, James Roxburgh
First, however, we pulled out some way, and laid down our fish-pots at a spot where Ali seemed to think it was possible we might capture one of the much-wished-for nautili.
From In the Eastern Seas by Kingston, William Henry Giles
In the fossiliferous rocks below the tertiary, we find immense numbers of nautili, ammonites, and other kindred genera of polythalamous shells, called cephalopods, which were all carnivorous.
From The Religion of Geology and Its Connected Sciences by Hitchcock, Edward
The shell is very different from those of the other nautili in being much more deeply indented with circular striae.
From Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, Volume 2 by Grey, George
They differ from the nautili in having the margins of the septa very much lobed or plaited, and the siphuncle dorsal.
From Webster's Unabridged Dictionary by Webster, Noah
The concrete nautiluses where we temporarily abandon our Kias and Porsches and mopeds produce, reproduce and shelter dualities.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 10, 2022
Metalsmiths set nautiluses on gold pedestals sculpted with mermaid and sea foam motifs.
From New York Times ● Sep. 2, 2021
But when Birger Schmitz, a geologist at Lund University in Sweden, went hunting for rock dating back 466 million years, he wasn’t hoping to find fossilized nautiluses; he was looking for fossilized meteorites.
From Scientific American ● Sep. 19, 2019
In oceanic terms, squids, cuttlefish, nautiluses, and octopuses are mass-produced.
From Slate ● Mar. 1, 2018
Still, for my part, I should have preferred fair weather, bright skies, and plenty of nautiluses and flying-fish.
From A Jolly Fellowship by Stockton, Frank Richard
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.
