Word.ws English Dictionary

cockles

cockles is the plural of cockle.

cockles is the third-person singular simple present indicative of cockle.

Meaning of cockle

Noun

cockle (plural cockles)

  1. Any of various edible European bivalve mollusks, of the family Cardiidae, having heart-shaped shells.
    • His wife, a small woman who walked always on high heels, borrowed Gerhardie's primus stove several times a day to cook her husband gargantuan meals of cockles, mussels, snails, and other such unpalatables.1990, Dido Davies, Andrew Davies, William Gerhardie: A Biography, page 164
  2. The shell of such a mollusk.
  3. (directly from French coquille) A wrinkle, pucker
  4. (broadly) A defect in sheepskin; firm dark nodules caused by the bites of keds on live sheep
  5. (figuratively, in plural) Chiefly in cockles of someone's heart: a person's innermost feelings.
  6. (UK) The dome of a heating furnace.

See all 13 meanings of cockle

Words formed from cockles

Phrases with cockles

Questions about cockles

What is cockles the plural of?
Cockles is the plural of cockle.

Words near cockles in the dictionary

  1. cocklelofts
  2. cockleman
  3. cocklemen
  4. cockler
  5. cocklers
  6. cockles
  7. cockleshell
  8. cockleshells
  9. cockless
  10. cocklessness
  11. cocklestove

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cockles (page history and authors); cockle (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-cockles.wav.

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