Definition of "medusa" [medusa]

• The tentacled, usually bell-shaped, free-swimming sexual stage in the life cycle of a coelenterate, such as a jellyfish. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "The medusa is a genus of molusca; and I think M. le Seur told me he reckons forty-three or forty-four species of that genus."
• "The object of this curious arrangement is to enable the whale to catch the little shrimps and small sea-blubbers, called "medusa;", on which it feeds."
• "Its hair was full of monsters bound in chains and bent with iron; a medusa for the 1890s."