Word.ws English Dictionary

mortal coils

mortal coils is the plural of mortal coil.

Meaning of mortal coil

Noun

mortal coil (plural mortal coils)

  1. The chaos and confusion of life.
  2. The physical body of a man (containing the spirit inside).
    • […] [A black swallowtail] does not—as a true insect does—change from worm to grub, and from grub to his mature form, but simply “shuffles off his mortal coil,”—skin, hairs, and leggings all complete, now and then, […] . He then leaves his shuffled-off “mortal coil” hanging upon a fragment of dirty...1871, “T. A.”, “Polyxenes”, in J. E. Taylor et al. (editors), Hardwicke’s Science-Gossip for 1872, Robert Hardwicke (1873), page 32

Questions about mortal coils

What is mortal coils the plural of?
Mortal coils is the plural of mortal coil.

Words near mortal coils in the dictionary

  1. mortadellas
  2. mortadelle
  3. mortage
  4. mortal
  5. mortal coil
  6. mortal coils
  7. mortal combat
  8. mortal combats
  9. mortal remains
  10. mortal sin
  11. mortal sins

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mortal coils (page history and authors); mortal coil (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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