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
  • Wick, for one, wouldn’t be able to survive without his nautilus pills.
    — Wai Chee Dimock, New York Times, 5 May 2017
  • 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
  • The hard shell of the nautilus encloses a series of chambers.
    — Amanda Kooser, Forbes, 6 Dec. 2024
  • As a result, the nautilus can dive far deeper than the argonaut, to a depth of 750 metres.
    — Ed Yong, Discover Magazine, 18 May 2010
  • Ammonites used the chambers in their shells to control buoyancy, much like the modern nautilus.
    — Torben Rick, The Conversation, 18 June 2026
  • 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
  • The nautilus-shell impressions, however, were made by a machine.
    — Edward Burtynsky, National Geographic, 25 Mar. 2020
  • Its spiral shape was inspired by the nautilus, the self-replicating living fossil.
    — Washington Post, 6 Mar. 2018
  • Along with the armored fish, reef-builders like corals and sponges died en masse, as did trilobites, nautilus-like goniatites and many more creatures.
    — Cody Cottier, Discover Magazine, 23 Jan. 2021
  • Some other living fossils include the coelacanth, the horseshoe crab, and the nautilus.
    — Joseph Castro, Discover Magazine, 17 Aug. 2011
  • 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
  • This spiral fossil comes from the shell of an ammonite, an extinct animal related to a modern nautilus.
    — Discover Magazine, 13 Nov. 2013
  • 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
  • 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
  • Buried within the stone was a tooth-bearing ribbon called a radula, a feature shared by all mollusks such as nautiluses and octopuses.
    — Samantha Agate, Miami Herald, 23 Apr. 2026
  • 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
  • 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
  • New research has reclassified the specimen as a relative of the nautilus, a cephalopod with both tentacles and a shell.
    — Samantha Agate, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 23 Apr. 2026
  • Architect Bruce Goff used acrylic for transparent handrails that curl through the nautilus-like interior.
    — Mimi Zeiger, latimes.com, 27 June 2019
  • Other cephalopods, like octopuses and nautiluses, lack S-crystallin lens proteins.
    — Kai Sinclair, Science | AAAS, 10 Aug. 2017
  • The creature, Clements and his team determined, is actually a relative of the nautilus — a cephalopod with both tentacles and a shell.
    — Samantha Agate, Miami Herald, 23 Apr. 2026
  • 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
  • Like nautiluses, many coelacanths live in deep-sea environments, which are less affected by the surface conditions that result in mass extinctions.
    — Scott Travers, Forbes, 7 Sep. 2024
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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

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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