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cocoon

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • //kəˈkuːn//

The silky case spun by the larvae of some insects in which they metamorphose, protecting the pupa within.

noun

  1. 1

    The silky case spun by the larvae of some insects in which they metamorphose, protecting the pupa within.

  2. 2

    figurativeAny similar protective case.

    The bad guys generally don’t like to get on trains, because they’re trapped on a moving cocoon that the CTA controls.

Etymology

From French cocon, a diminutive of coque (“shell”).

verb

  1. 1

    figurativeTo envelop in a protective case.

    Vern grabbed the throw draped over the back of the sofa and cocooned herself within it.

  2. 2

    figurativeTo withdraw into such a case.

Forms

plural
cocoons
past tense
cocooned
past participle
cocooned
present participle
cocooning
third person singular
cocoons
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).