Wiktionary:Word of the day/November 4

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sarcophagus n

A stone coffin, often with its exterior inscribed, or decorated with sculpture. (by extension) (informal) The cement and steel structure that encases the destroyed nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Chernobyl, Ukraine. (historical) An 18th-century form of wine cooler (“a piece of equipment used to keep wine chilled”). (obsolete except Ancient Greece, historical) A kind of limestone used by the Ancient Greeks for coffins, so called because it was thought to consume the flesh of corpses. sarcophagus v (transitive) To enclose (a corpse, etc.) in a sarcophagus (noun sense 1). The tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered on this day in 1922 in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt. It was the first known largely intact royal burial from Ancient Egypt.

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