"corbeau" meaning in English

See corbeau in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: corbeaux [plural]
Etymology: Borrowed from French corbeau m (“raven”). Etymology templates: {{bor|en|fr|corbeau||raven|g=m}} French corbeau m (“raven”) Head templates: {{en-noun|corbeaux}} corbeau (plural corbeaux)
  1. The black vulture, Coragyps atratus.
    Sense id: en-corbeau-en-noun-K1QV~RWF Categories (other): Pages with 3 entries, Pages with entries, Blacks, Greens, Vultures Disambiguation of Pages with 3 entries: 11 18 1 1 24 4 6 2 28 1 4 Disambiguation of Pages with entries: 11 19 1 1 27 2 6 1 30 1 2 Disambiguation of Blacks: 51 24 24 Disambiguation of Greens: 33 29 38 Disambiguation of Vultures: 73 19 9
  2. (historical) A man who carts away the dead plague victims. Tags: historical
    Sense id: en-corbeau-en-noun-4VtmhkKg Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 3 entries, Pages with entries, Corvids, Greens Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 24 73 3 Disambiguation of Pages with 3 entries: 11 18 1 1 24 4 6 2 28 1 4 Disambiguation of Pages with entries: 11 19 1 1 27 2 6 1 30 1 2 Disambiguation of Corvids: 40 55 5 Disambiguation of Greens: 33 29 38
  3. A very dark shade of green, almost black.
    Sense id: en-corbeau-en-noun-pEJozmtW Categories (other): Greens Disambiguation of Greens: 33 29 38
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Related terms: corbie

Inflected forms

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          "text": "The local corbeaux, black, heavy, hunched, hopped about the slopes of rubbish; the children of the shanty town ran between the traffic on the rubbish-strewn highway to get to the dump.",
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          "ref": "2016, Elizabeth Nunez, Prospero's Daughter, →ISBN, page 317:",
          "text": "Across the blue sky, a big black bird, a vulture, a corbeau. It swooped down low and landed, its long, ringed legs trembling as it anchored itself on the branch of a thick-trunked tree. Around it, more corbeaux, cemetery gargoyles guarding the dead.",
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          "ref": "1972, David Victor Glass, Roger Revelle, Population and social change, page 234:",
          "text": "By 8 August, it was necessary to conscript beggars to bury the dead because the corbeaux, special bearers of plague-striken corpses, no longer sufficed for the task.",
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          "ref": "2001, A Social History of the Cloister, →ISBN, page 212:",
          "text": "The next day she died and her body was removed by the corbeaux (the men who carted away the dead) - an ignominious death like that of Jesus Christ, wrote the annalist.",
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          "ref": "2012, Marie-Hélène Huet, The Culture of Disaster, →ISBN, page 28:",
          "text": "By late summer, the magistrates themselves admitted their helplessness. They called in the notorious and dreaded corbeaux—convicts promised a commutation of their sentence in exchange for performing the dangerous task of removing the bodies.",
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        "(historical) A man who carts away the dead plague victims."
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Download raw JSONL data for corbeau meaning in English (3.5kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2026-02-11 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2026-02-01 using wiktextract (f492ef9 and 59dc20b). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.