Word.ws English Dictionary

Cocytus

/koʊˈsaɪtəs/

Cocytus proper noun: a river of the underworld in Greek mythology.

Proper noun

Cocytus or the Cocytus

  1. A river of the underworld in Greek mythology.
    • By the Stigiall flode, / And the stremes wode / Of Cochitos bottumles well; […]1523, John Skelton, A ryght delectable tratyse upon a goodly Garlande or Chapelet of Laurell; republished in John Scattergood, editor, John Skelton: The Complete English Poems, 1983, →OCLC, page 349...
    • A bold bad man, that dar'd to call by name / Great Gorgon, prince of darknes and dead night, / At which Cocytus quakes and Styx is put to flight.1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book I”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC, page 13

Examples of Cocytus in a sentence

  • All theſe Cocytus bounds vvith ſqualid Reeds, / VVith Muddy Ditches, and vvith deadly VVeeds: […]1697, Virgil, “The Fourth Book of the Georgics”, in John Dryden, transl., The Works of Virgil: Containing His Pastorals, Georgics, and...
  • Ms. [Carol] Orlock uses her sensuous pictorial imagination to advantage in rendering the chilling underworld landscapes, where we embark as if on an eerie pleasure cruise down the Cocytus.1987 August 9, Mary Hawthorne, “In Short: Fiction”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC...

Forms of Cocytus

alternative formCocytos
alternative formKokytos

Origin of Cocytus

Learned borrowing from Latin Cōcȳtus, from Ancient Greek Κωκυτός (Kōkutós, literally “lamentation”).

Words formed from Cocytus

Questions about Cocytus

What does Cocytus mean?
Cocytus means a river of the underworld in Greek mythology.
How do you use Cocytus in a sentence?
All theſe Cocytus bounds vvith ſqualid Reeds, / VVith Muddy Ditches, and vvith deadly VVeeds: […]
What part of speech is Cocytus?
Cocytus is a proper noun.
How do you pronounce Cocytus?
Cocytus is pronounced /koʊˈsaɪtəs/.

Words near Cocytus in the dictionary

  1. cocyclical
  2. cocyclomatic
  3. Cocytean
  4. Cocytian
  5. Cocytos
  6. Cocytus
  7. cod
  8. cod end
  9. cod ends
  10. cod Latin
  11. cod line

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Cocytus (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)-Vealhurl-Cocytus.wav.

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