Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Not furnished with a coffin; not put into a coffin.

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

  • adjective Not placed in a coffin.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

un- +‎ coffined

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Examples

  • Those who died first were coffined by their dying friends; a row of coffins was found, in the spring, each with a man in it; two men uncoffined, side by side, were dead upon the floor.

    The North-West Passage 2003

  • They were in a narrow cavern of brown, wood-scented darkness, with a dim focus of light before them, that shone on an empty coffin and an uncoffined body, and just showed them the rough outlines of the two prayer-desks drawn up side by side at a little distance from the catafalque.

    A Morbid Taste For Bones Peters, Ellis, 1913-1995 1977

  • Finding no reference to an uncoffined body, I checked with an officer of the Board of Health, who told me there is no law in California requiring that a coffin be used when a body is cremated.

    The Undertaker's Racket 1969

  • I tried two more funeral establishments and was told substantially the same thing: cremation of an uncoffined body is prohibited under California law.

    The Undertaker's Racket 1969

  • I tried two more funeral establishments and was told substantially the same thing: cremation of an uncoffined body is prohibited under California law.

    The Undertaker's Racket 1963

  • Finding no reference to an uncoffined body, I checked with an officer of the Board of Health, who told me there is no law in California requiring that a coffin be used when a body is cremated.

    The Undertaker's Racket 1963

  • When a Jew was buried in Tetuan, the uncoffined body, wrapped in sheets on a wooden bier, might only be borne out of the city by the

    In the Tail of the Peacock Isabel Savory

  • But no pen has recorded the numbers of the forlorn and starving who perished by the wayside or in the ditches, or of the mournful groups, sometimes of whole families, who lay down and died, one after another, upon the floor of their miserable cabins, and so remained uncoffined and unburied, till chance unveiled the appalling scene.

    The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) With Notices of Earlier Irish Famines John O'Rourke

  • Your churches will be shut, and the relics of the holy saints will be laid in ashes, the priests will not give prayers nor the Church its holy offices; and the dead shall lie uncoffined, for no prayers may be said over them.

    King Arthur's Knights The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls Henry Gilbert

  • They are not only in graveyards, where "mossy marbles rest"; they are strewn, "unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown," over the whole surface of the globe, and lie embosomed in the gulfs of the great, restless ocean.

    The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 Various

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