Coffin

What they throw people and sometimes pets into for burial purposes. Hideously expensive, coffins are intended to preserve a body along with the stuff that the undertaker puts in it. Really doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you consider that the bodies in coffins are usually stone dead, so the bodies don't care if they're preserved. People can't see into a coffin anyways, so why bother? Just toss me in a hole in the ground when I croak.

The innkeeper of The Spouter Inn in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. An enlightened character for his time, he allows Queequeg, a cannibal, to stay in his inn. Puts Ishmael in the same room with the cannibal, but is also willing to use a plane to get the knots out of a pine bench, for Ishmael's bed. Represents the phenomenon of the common people in a society accepting strange things before the upper-class does.
An interesting character, to say the least, though rather short-lived. He only takes a part in the work from chapters two through five.

A sleeping space usually about 1.5 meters long and 1 meter wide with a pod-like door at one end to allow entrance and exit. Temper foam often covers the entire floor of this capsule. They are common among business men in Japan.

Cof"fin (?; 115), n. [OE., a basket, receptacle, OF. cofin, fr. L. cophinus. See Coffer, n.]

1.

The case in which a dead human body is inclosed for burial.

They embalmed him [Joseph], and he was put in a coffin. Gen. 1. 26.

2.

A basket.

Wyclif (matt. xiv. 20).

3.

A casing or crust, or a mold, of pastry, as for a pie.

Of the paste a coffin I will rear. Shak.

4.

A conical paper bag, used by grocers.

Nares.

5. Far.

The hollow crust or hoof of a horse's foot, below the coronet, in which is the coffin bone.

Coffin bone, the foot bone of the horse and allied animals, inclosed within the hoof, and corresponding to the third phalanx of the middle finger, or toe, of most mammals. -- Coffin joint, the joint next above the coffin bone.

© Webster 1913.

Cof"fin, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Coffined (?); p. pr. & vb. n. Coffining.]

To inclose in, or as in, a coffin.

Would'st thou have laughed, had I come coffined home? Shak.

Devotion is not coffined in a cell. John Hall (1646).

© Webster 1913.