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morse

nounnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//mɔːs//

A clasp or fastening used to fasten a cope in the front, usually decorative.

noun

  1. 1

    A clasp or fastening used to fasten a cope in the front, usually decorative.

    The morse bore a seraph's head in gold-thread raised work.

Etymology

From Middle French mors, from Latin morsus (“bite; clasp”), from mordere (“to bite”).

noun

  1. 1

    obsoleteSynonym of walrus.

    The morse is said to roar or bellow loudly, but the animal we slew made no outcry, [...]

    Then we passed through a great deale of small ice, and sawe, upon some peices, two morses, and upon some, one; and also diuers seales, layeing upon peices of ice.

Etymology

Uncertain, perhaps ultimately from Proto-Samic *moršë. Compare Russian морж (morž, “walrus”), Sami morša, Finnish mursu (all attested later), and possibly the second element of translingual Rosmarus.

Forms

plural
morses
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).