Word.ws English Dictionary

couchant

UK/ˈkaʊtʃənt/

couchant adjective: lying with belly down and front legs extended; crouching.

couchant: lying with belly down and front legs extended; crouching
Image: Sodacan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Adjective

couchant (not comparable)

  1. Lying with belly down and front legs extended; crouching.
    • The dogs, with eager yelp, / Are struggling to be free; / The hawks in frequent stoop / Token their haste for flight; / And couchant on the saddle-bow, / With tranquil eyes, and talons sheath’d, / The ounce expects his liberty.1801, Robert Southey, “(please specify the page)”, in Thalaba the Destroyer, volume (please specify |volume=I or II), London: […] [F]or T[homas] N[orton] Longman and O[wen] Rees, […], by Biggs and...
    • There were the tawny rocks, like lions couchant, defying the ocean, whose waves incessantly dashed against and scoured them with vast quantities of gravel.1865, Henry D[avid] Thoreau, “The Shipwreck”, in [Sophia Thoreau; William Ellery Channing], editors, Cape Cod, Boston, Mass.: Ticknor and Fields, →OCLC, page 14
  2. Represented as crouching with the head raised.
    • His crest was covered with a couchant Hownd, / And all his armour seem'd of antique mould […]1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto II”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC

Examples of couchant in a sentence

  • Two figures faced each other, large, austere; / A couchant sphinx in shadow to the breast, / An angel standing in the moonlight clear; […]1880, James Thomson, chapter XX, in The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems, London: Reeves and Turner, […], →OCLC:
  • Or again, have you ever watched fine collie dogs couchant at twenty yards' distance?1922 October 26, Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, Richmond, London: […] Leonard & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, →OCLC; republished...

Origin of couchant

From Middle English couchant, from Middle French couchant.

Words formed from couchant

Questions about couchant

What does couchant mean?
Couchant means lying with belly down and front legs extended; crouching.
How do you use couchant in a sentence?
Two figures faced each other, large, austere; / A couchant sphinx in shadow to the breast, / An angel standing in the moonlight clear; […]
What part of speech is couchant?
Couchant is an adjective.
How do you pronounce couchant?
Couchant is pronounced /ˈkaʊtʃənt/ (UK).

Words near couchant in the dictionary

  1. couch-surfer
  2. couch-surfers
  3. couch-surfing
  4. couch-surfs
  5. couchable
  6. couchant
  7. couchant and levant
  8. couchbound
  9. couche-couche
  10. couched
  11. couched a hogshead

Source and license

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