corbeau

plural corbeaux

1. The black vulture, Coragyps atratus.

   A whale man, if you see a whale. It beach. It taking up the whole of La Tinta. You not see the corbeaux? The Marines say they think it must be dead.

   2014, Lawrence Scott, Night Calypso, →ISBN

   2 more examples

   The local corbeaux, black, heavy, hunched, hopped about the slopes of rubbish; the children of the shanty town ran between the traffic on the rubbish-strewn highway to get to the dump.

   2011, V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World, →ISBN

   Across the blue sky, a big black bird, a vulture, a corbeau. It swooped down low and landed, its long, ringed legs trembling as it anchored itself on the branch of a thick-trunked tree. Around it, more corbeaux, cemetery gargoyles guarding the dead.

   2016, Elizabeth Nunez, Prospero's Daughter, →ISBN, page 317

2. historicalA man who carts away the dead plague victims.

   By 8 August, it was necessary to conscript beggars to bury the dead because the corbeaux, special bearers of plague-striken corpses, no longer sufficed for the task.

   1972, David Victor Glass, Roger Revelle, Population and social change, page 234

   2 more examples

   The next day she died and her body was removed by the corbeaux (the men who carted away the dead) - an ignominious death like that of Jesus Christ, wrote the annalist.

   2001, A Social History of the Cloister, →ISBN, page 212

   By late summer, the magistrates themselves admitted their helplessness. They called in the notorious and dreaded corbeaux—convicts promised a commutation of their sentence in exchange for performing the dangerous task of removing the bodies.

   2012, Marie-Hélène Huet, The Culture of Disaster, →ISBN, page 28

3. A very dark shade of green, almost black.

plural Corbeaus

1. A surname from French.