Word.ws English Dictionary

cephalophore

cephalophore noun: any of a group of saints depicted in art carrying heads in their hands.

cephalophore: any of a group of saints depicted in art carrying heads in their hands
Image: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

cephalophore (plural cephalophores)

  1. Any of a group of saints depicted in art carrying heads in their hands.
    • According to William of Worcester, quite a large number of Cornish saints were cephalophores: besides S. Nectan and S. Willow, he tells us that “there were three brothers under the name of Genesius and each one carried his head.”1960, Gilbert Hunter Doble, The Saints of Cornwall, volume 5, page 60
  2. (obsolete) Synonym of cephalopod: a mollusk of the class Cephalopoda.
    Synonyms:
    cephalopod

Synonyms of cephalophore

Forms of cephalophore

pluralcephalophores

Origin of cephalophore

From Ancient Greek κεφαλή (kephalḗ, “head”) + -φόρος (-phóros, “bearing”), a derivative of φέρω (phérō, “I bear, I carry”); in the Christian sense, via French céphalophore, coined by Marcel Hébert in 1914.

Questions about cephalophore

What does cephalophore mean?
Cephalophore means any of a group of saints depicted in art carrying heads in their hands.
What part of speech is cephalophore?
Cephalophore is a noun.
What is the plural of cephalophore?
The plural of cephalophore is cephalophores.

Words near cephalophore in the dictionary

  1. cephalopelvimetries
  2. cephalopelvimetry
  3. cephalopharyngeal
  4. cephalophine
  5. cephalophines
  6. cephalophore
  7. cephalophores
  8. cephaloplastin
  9. cephalopod
  10. cephalopodal
  11. cephalopode

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cephalophore (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “cephalophore.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cephalophore. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.