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mummy

UK/ˈmʌm.i/US/ˈmʌm.i/
nounB1Common in everyday speech and writing · #2,513 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: mummies

A mummy is a body preserved by drying and wrapping. An Egyptian mummy, unwrap the mummy, a mummy in a case.

Egyptian embalmers dried the body in natron for weeks before wrapping it, and the results have lasted thousands of years. Not all are deliberate: bodies preserved by ice, bog or desert are mummies too. Note that the word comes through Arabic from the Persian for wax, from the black resin on them.

Alyssa Bivins · CC BY-SA 4.0

Definitions of mummy

  1. 1nounmummyA body preserved by drying and wrapping.B1

    “The museum has an Egyptian mummy that is over three thousand years old.”

mummy is a preserved body.

Where it comes from

Medieval Latin mumia comes through Arabic from Persian mum, wax, for the dark resinous substance found on the bodies.

  1. Persian

    مومیا

  2. Arabic

    مُومِيَاء

  3. Medieval Latin

    mumia

  4. Middle French

    momie

  5. Anglo-Norman

    mumie

  6. Middle English

    mummie

  7. English, today

    mummy

Built from

  • موم · Persian — wax

From Middle English mummie, from Anglo-Norman mumie, from Middle French momie, from Medieval Latin mumia, from Arabic مُومِيَاء, from Persian مومیا, from موم (“wax”). a doublet of mumijo.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in History & Eras

Practise this word

mummy in the wild

  • Before this discovery, the oldest known deliberate mummy was a child, one of the Chinchorro mummies found in the Camarones Valley, Chile, which dates around 5050 B.C.

    Mummy

  • The Spirit Cave mummy is the oldest human mummy found in North America.

    Spirit Cave mummy

  • Although Sternberg was working under contract to the Natural History Museum, London, Henry Fairfield Osborn of the AMNH managed to secure the mummy.

    Edmontosaurus mummy AMNH 5060

  • The following is a list of mummy films.

    List of mummy films

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.