How to Use nautilus in a Sentence
nautilus
noun-
One looked like a nautilus shell, with thick dots marking points along its swirl.
—Sam Anderson, New York Times, 28 Sep. 2017
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The cubbies were filled with objects: a nautilus, a hat, a small volcano.
—Honor Jones, The Atlantic, 28 Dec. 2021
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The first roll turned out a real dud, the gim too loose, each cut piece unwinding like a nautilus.
—Jennifer Hope Choi, Bon Appétit, 19 Aug. 2020
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Wick, for one, wouldn’t be able to survive without his nautilus pills.
—Wai Chee Dimock, New York Times, 5 May 2017
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In the ocean’s depths where oxygen gets thin, the nautilus seems to be putting itself at risk by expending so much effort on movement.
—New York Times, 23 Feb. 2018
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My parents had other O’Keeffe prints, too—cow skulls and empty mesas, nautilus-shell whorls and black doorways in adobe houses.
—Rachel Syme, The New Yorker, 6 Mar. 2020
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Its spiral shape was inspired by the nautilus, the self-replicating living fossil.
—Washington Post, 6 Mar. 2018
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The team plans to select one or more species of cephalopod — the group including squid, octopus, cuttlefish and nautilus — as part of their lineup.
—Quanta Magazine, 27 July 2016
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While most living squids have an internal hard-shell remnant known as a pen, the ram’s horn squid has an internal shell shaped more like the external, coiled shell of its cousin the nautilus.
—Danielle Hall, Smithsonian Magazine, 17 Dec. 2020
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The nautilus has not populated the earth as extensively as the ammonite, which broke into thousands of species, Famoso said.
—Kyle Spurr, The Christian Science Monitor, 19 Mar. 2018
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The nautilus-shell impressions, however, were made by a machine.
—Edward Burtynsky, National Geographic, 25 Mar. 2020
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Inside the squid’s oblong mantle lies a multi-chambered spiral shell that looks something like a miniature nautilus shell.
—Alex Fox, Smithsonian Magazine, 3 Nov. 2020
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Architect Bruce Goff used acrylic for transparent handrails that curl through the nautilus-like interior.
—Mimi Zeiger, latimes.com, 27 June 2019
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And while this feature persists in the nautilus and a few other remaining species, subsequent cephalopods eventually shed their shells.
—Colin Dickey, New Republic, 21 Sep. 2017
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The structure of the modern nautilus shells was not as close to that of prehistoric ammonites as Case and colleagues suggested, and the robotic mosasaur model was too simple and inflexible.
—Brian Switek, WIRED, 11 Apr. 2012
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And, despite its continued association with all things water, there are some who claim that nautilus motifs are bad luck, since the nautilus typically sinks to the depths of the ocean.
—Ayesha Khan, CNT, 21 July 2017
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Giant mollusks with flanged shells that looked like alien cruisers disappeared forever, and many species of nautilus-like cephalopods called ammonites also went extinct.
—National Geographic, 18 Dec. 2019
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The idea is that the nautilus is the perfect proportion and can be translated to architecture, composition, whatever.
—Hadley Mendelsohn, House Beautiful, 9 Feb. 2021
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Other cephalopods, like octopuses and nautiluses, lack S-crystallin lens proteins.
—Kai Sinclair, Science | AAAS, 10 Aug. 2017
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First described by Greek mathematicians, this irrational figure (also called Phi) has been found in hurricane spirals, peregrine falcon dives, and nautilus shells.
—Popular Science, 17 Feb. 2021
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The ever-fascinating Fibonacci spiral, for example, shows up in everything from sunflower seed arrangements to nautilus shells to pine cones.
—Maddie Burakoff, Smithsonian, 6 June 2019
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Adding weight to this theory is evidence that nautiluses, a closely related shelled cephalopod known to be less intelligent, don’t possess the same editing capabilities.
—Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 24 Jan. 2018
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'nautilus.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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