Coffin vs Urn - What's the difference?
coffin | urn |
An oblong closed box in which a dead person is buried.
(obsolete) A basket.
* Wycliffe's Bible
A casing or crust, or a mold, of pastry, as for a pie.
* Shakespeare
(obsolete) A conical paper bag, used by grocers.
The hollow crust or hoof of a horse's foot, below the coronet, in which is the coffin bone.
(Webster 1913)
To place in a coffin.
* 2007 , (Barbara Everett), "Making and Breaking in Shakespeare's Romances," London Review of Books , 29:6, p. 21:
a vase with a footed base
* Bishop Wilkins
* Dryden
* {{quote-book
, year = 1967
, first = Barbara
, last = Sleigh
, authorlink = Barbara Sleigh
, title = (Jessamy)
, edition = 1993
, location = Sevenoaks, Kent
, publisher=Bloomsbury
, isbn = 0 340 19547 9
, page = 47
, url =
, passage = ‘You would take her side Marcus! You don’t know what it’s like at school. Mary Fibbs and all her friends start making coughing noises whenever I come near them, and then they all giggle and Mary says Grandfather mixes his cough medicine in the urns on top of the gate posts after dark with his umbrella, and now Jessamy! I only wish Harry was here. You’re all against me. I hate you all. I hate you!’
}}
a metal vessel for serving tea or coffee
a vessel for ashes or cremains of a deceased person
(figurative) Any place of burial; the grave.
* Shakespeare
(historical, Roman antiquity) A measure of capacity for liquids, containing about three gallons and a half, wine measure. It was half the amphora, and four times the congius.
(botany) A hollow body shaped like an urn, in which the spores of mosses are contained; a spore case; a theca.
As nouns the difference between coffin and urn
is that coffin is an oblong closed box in which a dead person is buried while urn is (internet) uniform resource name.As a verb coffin
is to place in a coffin.coffin
English
(wikipedia coffin)Alternative forms
* cophin (archaic)Noun
(en noun)- And all ate, and were filled. And they took the reliefs of broken gobbets, twelve coffins full (Matthew 14:20).
- Of the paste a coffin I will rear.
- (Nares)
Usage notes
The type of coffin with upholstery and a half-open lid (mostly in the United States) is called a casket.Synonyms
* casket (US)Derived terms
* coffin bone * coffinlike * coffin nail * coffin ride * coffin ship * encoffin * encoffiner * encoffinmentVerb
(en verb)- The chest in which she is coffined washes ashore and is brought to the Lord Cerimon.
Synonyms
* encoffinurn
English
Noun
(en noun)- A rustic, digging in the ground by Padua, found an urn , or earthen pot, in which there was another urn.
- His scattered limbs with my dead body burn, / And once more join us in the pious urn .
- Or lay these bones in an unworthy urn , / Tombless, with no remembrance over them.