American Heritage Dictionary Entry: cone HOW TO USE THE DICTIONARY To look up an entry in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, use the search window above. For best results, after typing in the word, click on the “Search” button instead of using the “enter” key. Some compound words (like bus rapid transit, dog whistle, or identity theft) don’t appear on the drop-down list when you type them in the search bar. For best results with compound words, place a quotation mark before the compound word in the search window. guide to the dictionary THE USAGE PANEL The Usage Panel is a group of nearly 200 prominent scholars, creative writers, journalists, diplomats, and others in occupations requiring mastery of language. Annual surveys have gauged the acceptability of particular usages and grammatical constructions. The Panelists NEED HELP SOLVING A CROSSWORD PUZZLE? Go to our Crossword Puzzle Solver and type in the letters that you know, and the Solver will produce a list of possible solutions. -- AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY APP The new American Heritage Dictionary app is now available for iOS and Android. THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY BLOG The articles in our blog examine new words, revised definitions, interesting images from the fifth edition, discussions of usage, and more. OPEN DICTIONARY PROJECT Share your ideas for new words and new meanings of old words! Start Sharing Now! -- See word lists from the best-selling 100 Words Series! Find out more! INTERESTED IN DICTIONARIES? Check out the Dictionary Society of North America at http://www.dictionarysociety.com cone (kōn) Share: Tweet n. 1. Mathematics a. The surface generated by a straight line, the generator, passing through a fixed point, the vertex, and moving along a fixed curve, the directrix. b. A right circular cone. 2. a. The figure formed by a cone, bound or regarded as bound by its vertex and a plane section taken anywhere above or below the vertex. b. Something having the shape of this figure: "the cone of illuminated drops spilling beneath a street lamp" (Anne Tyler). 3. Botany a. A unisexual reproductive structure of most gymnospermous plants, such as conifers and cycads, typically consisting of a central axis around which there are scaly, overlapping, spirally arranged sporophylls that bear either pollen-containing structures or ovules. b. A similar, spore-producing structure of club mosses, horsetails, and spikemosses. c. A reproductive structure resembling a cone, such as the female inflorescence of a hop plant or the woody female catkin of an alder. 4. Physiology One of the photoreceptors in the retina of the eye that is responsible for daylight and color vision. These photoreceptors are most densely concentrated in the fovea centralis, creating the area of greatest visual acuity. Also called cone cell. 5. Any of various gastropod mollusks of the family Conidae of tropical and subtropical seas that have a conical, often vividly marked shell and that inject their prey with poisonous toxins, which can be fatal to humans. Also called cone shell. tr.v. coned, con·ing, cones To shape (something) like a cone or a segment of one. [French cône and Middle English cone, angle of a quadrant, both from Latin cōnus, from Greek kōnos; see kō- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.] (click for a larger image)cone top: right circular cone bottom: cones and rods of a human eye The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2022 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. Indo-European & Semitic Roots Appendices Thousands of entries in the dictionary include etymologies that trace their origins back to reconstructed proto-languages. You can obtain more information about these forms in our online appendices: Indo-European Roots Semitic Roots The Indo-European appendix covers nearly half of the Indo-European roots that have left their mark on English words. A more complete treatment of Indo-European roots and the English words derived from them is available in our Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. 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