phœnix

Noun

phoenix (plural phoenix or phoenixes or phoenices)

1. A mythological bird, said to be the only one of its kind, which lives for 500 years and then dies by burning to ashes on a pyre of its own making, ignited by the sun. It then arises anew from the ashes.
   • burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood1609, William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 19”, in Shake-speares Sonnets. […], London: By G[eorge] Eld for T[homas] T[horpe] and are to be sold by William Aspley, →OCLC
2. (figuratively) Anything that is reborn after apparently being destroyed.
   • Astronomers believe planets might form in this dead star's disk, like the mythical Phoenix rising up out of the ashes.
3. (Chinese) A mythological Chinese chimerical bird whose physical body symbolizes the six celestial bodies; a fenghuang.
4. (historical) A Greek silver coin used briefly from 1828 to 1832, divided into 100 lepta.
   • The national currency, the phoenix, which had been established by Kapodistrias, was renamed after an ancient Greek coin, the drachma.2019, Roderick Beaton, Greece: Biography of a Modern Nation, Penguin, published 2020, page 116
5. (obsolete) A marvelous person or thing.
   • He may not be a phœnix of cleverness in your sense; his profession is different; but it would be all the better for you to talk a little on his subjects.1871–1872, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter LVIII, in Middlemarch […], volume III, Edinburgh; London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book VI, page 282
6. A geometer moth of species Eulithis prunata.

See all 36 meanings of phoenix