coral

Pluralcorals

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A marine invertebrate of the class Anthozoa, typically living in colonies and building a hard calcium carbonate skeleton, or a colony of such animals.

   Each coral extends thousands of tiny polyps to capture food from the water.

   Warming seas have bleached the corals across much of the reef.

   Note

   Here coral is a countable noun: one coral, many corals, each an animal or a colony of animals. That separates it from the hard substance, which takes no plural. Divers count corals on a reef, but a carver works in coral. When the plural appears, as in bleached corals, the living creatures are meant.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   A hard substance formed from the accumulated calcium carbonate skeletons of marine anthozoans.

   Mediterranean coral has been carved into ornaments for thousands of years.

   The pendant's deep red coral had been polished to a soft glow.

   Note

   The word's history begins with the stone, not the animal. Greek korallion probably came from a Semitic word for a small pebble (compare Hebrew goral, Arabic jaral), and it first named the red variety found in the Mediterranean. That red Mediterranean material is also where the orange-pink color gets its name.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A somewhat yellowish orange-pink color, like that of the red coral of the Mediterranean Sea, often used as a gem.

   The designer chose coral for the spring collection.

   At dusk the sky shifted through pinks and corals.

   Similarsalmon, peach

   Note

   A color name that can be counted: a sky passes through pinks and corals. Writers have long given it to lips, as Rider Haggard does in She (1886–87): "The coral faded even from her lips." There the noun stands alone for the flush itself, so the color does the work an adjective otherwise would.

4. 4
   adjective

   Of an orange-pink color resembling that of coral.

   He picked a coral tie to match her gown.

   The bedroom's coral walls glowed in the evening light.

   Similarsalmon, peach

5. 5
   adjective

   Made from coral, the hard skeletal substance.

   The museum displayed a coral pendant taken from a Mediterranean reef.

   Sailors once traded coral charms believed to ward off illness.

   Note

   Here the word names a material, and it never takes degrees: a thing is made of coral or it is not, so nothing is "more coral" than another in this use. Before a noun it can be ambiguous. A coral necklace may be carved from the substance itself, or it may only share the orange-pink of the color adjective. Context, or a phrase like "carved from coral", settles which is meant.

6. 6
   nouncountable or uncountable

   The ovaries of a cooked lobster, named for their coral-like color.

   She stirred the lobster's coral into the simmering bisque.

   A good cook saves the coral from each lobster to thicken the sauce.

   Similarroe

7. 7
   nounhistoricalcountable or uncountable

   A children's plaything made from a piece of coral, usually with small bells and other fittings attached.

   The infant gripped a silver-handled coral, gnawing at the smooth red tip.

   On the very chair which I used to occupy when I was at work Marian was sitting now, with the child industriously sucking his coral upon her lap.

   1859, Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

   Similarteether, rattle

   Note

   A nursery object now met mostly in older fiction. In Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859), a child sits "industriously sucking his coral." It was a teething toy as much as a rattle: a polished length of coral on a handle hung with bells. A reader who meets "his coral" in such a scene should take it as the toy, not the material.

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