Word.ws English Dictionary

cothon

cothon noun: an artificial, protected harbor in a Phoenician city, especially and originally the one in Carthage.

Noun

cothon (plural cothons)

  1. An artificial, protected harbor in a Phoenician city, especially and originally the one in Carthage.
    • The cothons at Carthage, during the Punic wars, are said to have held over two hundred ships. The small size of the Motya cothon may be accounted for by […]1965, Helen Hill Miller, Sicily and the Western Colonies of Greece, New York: Scribner
    • Cothons - artificial inner harbours, or perhaps rather docks and repair basins - are another architectural feature ascribed to Phoenician and Punic towns […]1973, Rivista Di Studi Fenici, volume 1, page 142

Forms of cothon

pluralcothons

Origin of cothon

From Ancient Greek κώθων (kṓthōn), rendering a Phoenician term meaning something like "excavated". (Cothon was the name of the island in Carthage's artificial harbor, namesake of the type.)

Questions about cothon

What does cothon mean?
Cothon means an artificial, protected harbor in a Phoenician city, especially and originally the one in Carthage.
What part of speech is cothon?
Cothon is a noun.
What is the plural of cothon?
The plural of cothon is cothons.

Words near cothon in the dictionary

  1. Cotheridge
  2. Cothern
  3. Cotherns
  4. Cotherstone
  5. cothes
  6. cothon
  7. cothons
  8. cothouse
  9. cothouses
  10. Cothran
  11. Cothrans

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cothon (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: “cothon.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cothon. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.