conch
/kɒŋk
/ /kɒn(t)ʃ /- Strombus and other genera, family Strombidae, class Gastropoda.
- Earlier this month, additional protection was given under this convention to the queen conch mollusk, a popular food item famous for its enormous pink shell.
- Seilacher has shown such a function for orthocone cephalopod conchs in the same formation.
- Trumpets, conches, oboes and drums beat out a rhythm while a huge contingent of Kandyan dancers and drummers perform, their stunning period costumes adding a blaze of colour to the spectacle.
- I'm jolted awake the next morning by the trumpeting of a conch shell.
- The main walls of the interior are mostly built of hewn stone, the apse stones are better and the conch stones are very well-hewn.
- This example of classic tetra conch design with all its miniature size, strikes the viewers with its grandeur and integrity.
- Thus the backward expanding marginal folds of the septa provide circumferential anchorage sites that firmly hold the body to the buoyant conch in addition to the few, small adductor muscles.
- Furthermore, the conch of the specimen is more compressed and the umbilicus smaller in diameter than those of the genus Properrinites Elias, 1938.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Latin concha 'shellfish, shell', from Greek konkhē 'mussel, cockle, or shell-like cavity'.
conker from mid 18th century:
Children originally played conkers not with horse chestnuts but with snail shells. The word conker is first recorded in the 1840s as a dialect word for a snail shell, and may have originally come from conch (Middle English), a kind of mollusc, which is probably also the origin of conk (early 19th century), meaning ‘the nose’. On the other hand, conker could be related to conquer (ME, from Latin conquirere ‘gain, win’), which was how conker was often spelled. Indeed, an alternative name for the game at one time was conquerors. Horse chestnuts seem to have replaced snail shells late in the 19th century.