Word.ws English Dictionary

mermaids' tears

mermaids' tears noun: small plastic pellets, or nurdles, found as marine pollutants.

Noun

mermaids' tears pl (plural only)

  1. (colloquial, plural, plural-only) Small plastic pellets, or nurdles, found as marine pollutants.
  2. (colloquial, plural, plural-only) Small rounded pieces of sea glass.
    • I hadn't known how thirsty I was for the ocean until we found this beach near Victoria—not really beautiful, but diverse—a stretch of oddities, buttons of wood, mermaids' tears (glass fragments rubbed smooth), stones of worn-down brick.2000, Luci Shaw, God in the Dark: Through Grief and Beyond, page 263
    • […] glass and shells in the sand than gazing at the blue horizon. Seashells, round pebbles, driftwood—these natural materials are more precious to me than expensive jewels. I love hunting for "mermaids' tears"—pieces of broken glass that […]2021, Young-Ran Lee, Create Dream Catchers, page 41

Forms of mermaids' tears

alternative formmermaid's tears

Questions about mermaids' tears

What does mermaids' tears mean?
Mermaids' tears means small plastic pellets, or nurdles, found as marine pollutants.
What part of speech is mermaids' tears?
Mermaids' tears is a noun.

Words near mermaids' tears in the dictionary

  1. mermaidism
  2. mermaidlike
  3. mermaids
  4. mermaids' purse
  5. mermaids' purses
  6. mermaids' tears
  7. mermaidweed
  8. mermaidweeds
  9. mermaidy
  10. merman
  11. Mermanesque

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mermaids' tears (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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