Coffyn

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A long box in which a dead body is placed for burial or cremation ; an old term for the crust or case of a raised pie
2. The box made to hold a corpse before it is laid in the grave ; a historical name for the pastry shell that encloses a pie's filling
3. A casket used to bury the dead ; in earlier English, the hard pastry casing that held the contents of a pie

Etymology: "Coffyn" is simply an older spelling of "coffin," and the box it names began as a basket. The Greek "kophinos" meant a basket, and the Latin "cophinus" carried that sense into the Roman world. Old Northern French then turned the word toward containers of a different sort: first a basket or coffer, and later the sarcophagus-like box used for the dead. Its close relative "coffer," a strongbox for valuables, comes from the same root, so the two words are doublets that split apart on their way into English. English had its own word for the burial box, "þrūh" (a native Old English term), which the French-derived word eventually displaced. The second origin in the source, Cornish "koghyn" meaning an exploratory mining trench, is a separate possibility, and the spelling may have been nudged toward the Latin-Greek form, but the main line of descent runs through the basket.