corbeau
/kɔɹˈboʊ/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.54 in modern English
11
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
noun
A man who carts away the dead plague victims.
name
A surname from French.
Example Sentences
- "The local corbeaux, black, heavy, hunched, hopped about the slopes of rubbish; the children of the shanty town ran between the traffic on the rubbish-strewn highway to get to the dump."
- "A whale man, if you see a whale. It beach. It taking up the whole of La Tinta. You not see the corbeaux? The Marines say they think it must be dead."
- "Across the blue sky, a big black bird, a vulture, a corbeau. It swooped down low and landed, its long, ringed legs trembling as it anchored itself on the branch of a thick-trunked tree. Around it, more corbeaux, cemetery gargoyles guarding the dead."
- "By 8 August, it was necessary to conscript beggars to bury the dead because the corbeaux, special bearers of plague-striken corpses, no longer sufficed for the task."
- "The next day she died and her body was removed by the corbeaux (the men who carted away the dead) - an ignominious death like that of Jesus Christ, wrote the annalist."
- "By late summer, the magistrates themselves admitted their helplessness. They called in the notorious and dreaded corbeaux—convicts promised a commutation of their sentence in exchange for performing the dangerous task of removing the bodies."
Etymology
Origin
- Source language: French
Word Breakdown
- Root: Corbeau
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /kɔɹˈboʊ/
- British English: /ˈkɔːbəʊ/
Inflected Forms
corbeaux (plural)
Corbeaus (plural)