Word.ws English Dictionary

xiphias

/ˈzɪfiəs/

xiphias noun: synonym of swordfish.

Noun

xiphias (plural xiphias)

  1. Synonym of swordfish.
    • Huge Ziffius, whom Mariners eschew / No lesse, then rockes, as travellers informe […]1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto XII”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC
    • S. Malpighi having dissected the Head of a Xiphias or Sword Fish, which hath a very big Eye, observ'd that the middle of the Optick Nerve is nothing else, but a large Membrane, folded according to its length in many Doubles almost like a Fan, and invested by the Dura Mater.1700, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London, volume 3, page 38
    Synonyms:
    swordfish

Proper noun capitalized: Xiphias

Xiphias

  1. Synonym of Dorado (“constellation of the southern sky”).
    Synonyms:
    Dorado

Examples of xiphias in a sentence

  • Trebius Niger informs us that […] the xiphias, or, in other words, the sword-fish, has a sharp-pointed muzzle, with which it is able to pierce the sides of a ship and send it to the bottom […]1857, Bostock & Riley, “part 32.vi”, in Natural History, translation of original by Pliny:
  • In the xiphias, you observe, the enormous elongation of the head is produced by the elongation of the jaws proper – that is to say, of the pre-maxilla and nasal bones.23 May 1863, Prof. Huxley, “Structure and development of the vertebrate skeleton”, in The Lancet:

Synonyms of xiphias

Forms of xiphias

pluralxiphias

Origin of xiphias

Borrowed from translingual Xiphias or Latin xiphiās (“swordfish”).

Questions about xiphias

What does xiphias mean?
Xiphias means synonym of swordfish.
How do you use xiphias in a sentence?
Trebius Niger informs us that […] the xiphias, or, in other words, the sword-fish, has a sharp-pointed muzzle, with which it is able to pierce the sides of a ship and send it to the bottom […]
What part of speech is xiphias?
Xiphias can be a noun or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce xiphias?
Xiphias is pronounced /ˈzɪfiəs/ (UK).
What is the plural of xiphias?
The plural of xiphias is xiphias.

Words near xiphias in the dictionary

  1. Xiongs
  2. xipamide
  3. Xipaya
  4. xiphe
  5. xiphial
  6. xiphias
  7. xiphidiocercaria
  8. xiphidiocercous
  9. xiphihumeralis
  10. xiphihumeralises
  11. xiphiid

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: xiphias (page history and authors); Xiphias (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-xiphias.wav.

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