Portuguese men-of-war
Portuguese men-of-war is the plural of Portuguese man-of-war.
Meaning of Portuguese man-of-war
Noun
Portuguese man-of-war (plural Portuguese men-of-war)
- Physalia physalis, a marine cnidarian consisting of a floating colony of hydrozoans attached to a float, superficially resembling a jellyfish.
- Once the great streamers of a Portuguese man-of-war floated slowly by. They almost reached his head from the surface, fifteen feet away, and he remembered the whiplash of a sting from the contact of one of their tendrils that had burned for three of his days at Manatee Bay. If they caught a man...1954, Ian Fleming, “Beau Desert”, in Live and Let Die, London: Pan Books, published 1957, page 203
- Synonyms:
- bluebottle, man-of-war
- Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see Portuguese, man-of-war.
Questions about Portuguese men-of-war
- What is Portuguese men-of-war the plural of?
- Portuguese men-of-war is the plural of Portuguese man-of-war.
Words near Portuguese men-of-war in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Portuguese men-of-war (page history and authors); Portuguese man-of-war (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: “Portuguese men-of-war.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/portuguese_men-of-war. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.