coral

coral (ˈkɒrəl)
—n
1.	stony coral See also sea fan any marine mostly colonial coelenterate of the class Anthozoa having a calcareous, horny, or soft skeleton
2.	a.  the calcareous or horny material forming the skeleton of certain of these animals
	b.  See also red coral (as modifier): a coral reef
3.	a.  a rocklike aggregation of certain of these animals or their skeletons, forming an island or reef
	b.  (as modifier): a coral island
4.	a.  an object made of coral, esp a piece of jewellery
	b.  (as modifier): a coral necklace
5.	a.  a deep-pink to yellowish-pink colour
	b.  (as adjective): coral lipstick
6.	the roe of a lobster or crab, which becomes pink when cooked
[C14: from Old French, from Latin corāllium, from Greek korallion, probably of Semitic origin]

coral

Coral reef is attested from 1745.

coral   (kôr'əl)  Pronunciation Key  Any of numerous small, sedentary cnidarians (coelenterates) of the class Anthozoa. Corals often form massive colonies in shallow sea water and secrete a cup-shaped skeleton of calcium carbonate, which they can retreat into when in danger. Corals are related to the sea anemones and have stinging tentacles around the mouth opening that are used to catch prey. A hard, stony substance consisting of the skeletons of these animals. It is typically white, pink, or reddish and can form large reefs that support an abundance of ocean fish.

CORAL definition

1. Class Oriented Ring Associated Language.
2. A deductive database and logic programming system based on Horn-clause rules with extensions like SQL's group-by and aggregation operators. CORAL was developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It is implemented in C++ and has a Prolog-like syntax.
Many evaluation techniques are supported, including bottom-up fixpoint evaluation and top-down backtracking. Modules are separately compiled; different evaluation methods can be used in different modules within a single program. Disk-resident data is supported via an interface to the Exodus storage manager. There is an on-line help facility. It requires AT&T C++ 2.0 (or G++ soon) and runs on Decstation and Sun-4.
(ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/).
(1993-01-29)

Coral definition

Heb. ramoth, meaning "heights;" i.e., "high-priced" or valuable things, or, as some suppose, "that which grows high," like a tree (Job 28:18; Ezek. 27:16), according to the Rabbins, red coral, which was in use for ornaments. The coral is a cretaceous marine product, the deposit by minute polypous animals of calcareous matter in cells in which the animal lives. It is of numberless shapes as it grows, but usually is branched like a tree. Great coral reefs and coral islands abound in the Red Sea, whence probably the Hebrews derived their knowledge of it. It is found of different colours, white, black, and red. The red, being esteemed the most precious, was used, as noticed above, for ornamental purposes.