Word.ws English Dictionary

corbeau

UK/ˈkɔːbəʊ/US/kɔɹˈboʊ/

corbeau noun: the black vulture, Coragyps atratus.

corbeau: the black vulture, Coragyps atratus
Image: DickDaniels, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

corbeau (plural corbeaux)

  1. The black vulture, Coragyps atratus.
    • The local corbeaux, black, heavy, hunched, hopped about the slopes of rubbish; the children of the shanty town ran between the traffic on the rubbish-strewn highway to get to the dump.2011, V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World, →ISBN
    • A whale man, if you see a whale. It beach. It taking up the whole of La Tinta. You not see the corbeaux? The Marines say they think it must be dead.2014, Lawrence Scott, Night Calypso, →ISBN
  2. (historical) A man who carts away the dead plague victims.
    • By 8 August, it was necessary to conscript beggars to bury the dead because the corbeaux, special bearers of plague-striken corpses, no longer sufficed for the task.1972, David Victor Glass, Roger Revelle, Population and social change, page 234
    • The next day she died and her body was removed by the corbeaux (the men who carted away the dead) - an ignominious death like that of Jesus Christ, wrote the annalist.2001, A Social History of the Cloister, →ISBN, page 212
  3. A very dark shade of green, almost black.

Proper noun capitalized: Corbeau

Corbeau (plural Corbeaus)

  1. A surname from French.

Examples of corbeau in a sentence

  • Across the blue sky, a big black bird, a vulture, a corbeau.2016, Elizabeth Nunez, Prospero's Daughter, →ISBN, page 317:
  • They called in the notorious and dreaded corbeaux—convicts promised a commutation of their sentence in exchange for performing the dangerous task of removing the bodies.2012, Marie-Hélène Huet, The Culture of Disaster, →ISBN, page 28:

Forms of corbeau

Noun
pluralcorbeaux
Proper noun
pluralCorbeaus

Origin of corbeau

Borrowed from French corbeau m (“raven”). Doublet of corbel.

From French Corbeau.

Questions about corbeau

What does corbeau mean?
Corbeau means the black vulture, Coragyps atratus.
How do you use corbeau in a sentence?
Across the blue sky, a big black bird, a vulture, a corbeau.
What part of speech is corbeau?
Corbeau can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce corbeau?
Corbeau is pronounced /ˈkɔːbəʊ/ (UK).
What is the plural of corbeau?
The plural of corbeau is corbeaux.

Words near corbeau in the dictionary

  1. corbanoth
  2. corbans
  3. Corbasca
  4. corbe
  5. Corbeanca
  6. corbeau
  7. corbeaux
  8. Corbehem
  9. corbeil
  10. Corbeil-Essonnes
  11. corbeille

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: corbeau (page history and authors); Corbeau (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: “corbeau.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/corbeau. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.