Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of several cephalopod mollusks of the family Nautilidae of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, especially Nautilus pompilius, having numerous slender tentacles and an external coiled pearly shell divided into air-filled chambers.
  • noun The paper nautilus.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The Argonauta argo, or any other cephalopod believed to sail by means of the expanded tentacular arms.
  • noun A genus of tetrabranchiate cephalopoda, type of the Nautilacea or Nautilidæ, to which very different limits have been assigned.
  • noun A Portuguese man-of-war. See Physalia.
  • noun A form of diving-bell which requires no suspension, sinking and rising by the agency of condensed air.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun (Zoöl.) The only existing genus of tetrabranchiate cephalopods. About four species are found living in the tropical Pacific, but many other species are found fossil. The shell is spiral, symmetrical, and chambered, or divided into several cavities by simple curved partitions, which are traversed and connected together by a continuous and nearly central tube or siphuncle. See tetrabranchiata.
  • noun The argonaut; -- also called paper nautilus. See Argonauta, and Paper nautilus, under Paper.
  • noun A variety of diving bell, the lateral as well as vertical motions of which are controlled, by the occupants.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A marine mollusc, of the family Nautilidae native to the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean, which has tentacles and a spiral shell with a series of air-filled chambers, of which Nautilus is the type genus.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun cephalopod of the Indian and Pacific oceans having a spiral shell with pale pearly partitions
  • noun a submarine that is propelled by nuclear power
  • noun cephalopod mollusk of warm seas whose females have delicate papery spiral shells

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Latin, from Greek nautilos, sailor, nautilus, from nautēs, mariner, from naus, ship; see nāu- in Indo-European roots.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Latin nautilus, from Ancient Greek ναυτίλος (nautilos, "paper nautilus, sailor").

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Examples

  • The word "nautilus" comes from the Greek for boat.

    NYT > Home Page By WILLIAM J. BROAD 2011

  • Head on over to her blog for even more juice on GNOME 3 from the week-long discussion. remove combo box to change nautilus view, just use menu? frustration that nautilus is becoming like midnight commander, not beautiful to use, too complicated dont like split pane idea, why not use two windows? split-pane seems universally disliked by GNOME designers. snap to side-by-side like in windows 7 would be good and would remove need for split-pane. search in nautilus sucks confusion between magnifying glass icon for search vs zoom

    Archive 2010-02-01 2010

  • Most noatble fix pertaining to this: the back, forward and up buttons in nautilus.

    Subtle icon changes in Lucid of late 2010

  • Most noatble fix pertaining to this: the back, forward and up buttons in nautilus.

    Archive 2010-04-01 2010

  • Most noatble fix pertaining to this: the back, forward and up buttons in nautilus.

    Subtle icon changes in Lucid of late 2010

  • We measured the hole they would require for entering, and discovered that out of the number we had made, the one which had caught the nautilus was the only one with a hole sufficiently large to allow it to enter.

    In the Eastern Seas William Henry Giles Kingston 1847

  • Catching the nautilus is a largely unregulated free-for-all in which fishermen from poor South Pacific countries gladly accept $1 per shell.

    NYT > Home Page By WILLIAM J. BROAD 2011

  • And there's the first thing Apple actually does good in my opinion: Why should a file browser that people need to find files be called nautilus?

    tante's blog 2008

  • Aphrodite with the "nautilus," by which is meant the argonaut of zoologists.

    The Evolution of the Dragon G. Elliot Smith

  • The two last stanzas, with their associates, will require a few of your delicate touches, before you mount them on the nautilus which is to bear them buoyant round the world.

    Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey Cottle, Joseph 1847

Comments

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  • A submarine‽ Pshaw.

    November 13, 2007