Conchylia

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Shellfish or molluscs, especially those with hard shells ; a purple dye that was once extracted from certain sea snails
2. Molluscs with shells, such as snails and mussels ; the rich purple colouring that ancient peoples obtained from certain marine shellfish
3. Creatures of the mollusc group that bear shells ; a costly purple pigment historically produced by crushing the bodies of sea snails

Etymology: Conchylia is the plural of "conchylium", a Latin word borrowed from Greek "konchylion", meaning a mollusc or shellfish, and in particular the purple dye obtained from certain sea snails. The Greek word came from "konche", "shell", the same root that gives English "conch". The Latin plural has a dye-related history of its own: the murex snails that Phoenician and Roman dyers harvested were the source of Tyrian purple, and classical writers used the term for both the creatures and the colour they yielded. English writers adopted the Latin plural as a learned term for shelled marine animals, so the word carries the same double meaning that the original Greek did.

Synonyms: shellfish, molluscs