Octopus Vocabulary Worksheet

Press Print worksheet to match twelve octopus terms, from arm and sucker to ink and siphon, to their meanings.

Your own pairs, one per line: left = right

A sample is on the sheet. What you type replaces it.

What you type stays in your browser. Nothing is sent to us.

Pairs

Answer by

Set

More options

Text size

Letter style

Paper

Direction

Add a "Name" and "Date" line at the top Add an answer key as the last page

Next step Next: ocean word search

All 36 terms

Octopus basics 12

arm A bendy limb with suckers from base to tip. The arms are joined to each other near the base by a web of skin.
beak The hard, two-part jaws hidden among the arms. The two halves work like a pair of scissors. The beak is made mainly of chitin and protein, and an octopus uses it to pierce the shells of its prey.
camouflage Blending in by matching the look of a place. An octopus can change the pattern and color of its skin to match its surroundings. Hiding is its first line of defense.
cephalopod The class of mollusks that octopuses belong to. Squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses are cephalopods too. The name is Greek for head-feet, and every cephalopod lives in the sea.
den The hole or crack where an octopus makes its home. An octopus carries its catch home to eat, and the leftovers pile up outside the den in a heap called a midden.
ink A dark cloud squirted out to cover a getaway. The ink is kept in an ink sac and gets its dark color from melanin. Octopus ink is generally black, and squid ink is blue-black.

Show all 36 terms (30 more)

Octopus basics, continued

mantle The body wall that wraps around an octopus's organs. In many mollusks the skin of the mantle makes the shell. Cephalopods use the space inside the mantle for jet propulsion.
mollusk Any animal of the great group of snails and clams. Snails and clams are mollusks that live inside a shell. An octopus is a mollusk with no shell around its body.
octopus An eight-armed sea creature with a baglike body. There are some 300 kinds of octopus. They live in many parts of the ocean, from coral reefs and the shore between the tides to the floor of the deep sea.
siphon The nozzle an octopus aims to jet about. It is also called the funnel. Ink leaves the body through it too.
sucker A round cup of muscle that grips by suction. Suckers cover the underside of each arm. They respond keenly to touch and to taste.
tentacle A long limb of a squid, with suckers only at its tip. Squid and cuttlefish have eight arms and two tentacles. Nearly every octopus has arms only, though its arms are often called tentacles.

Body and behavior 12

autotomy Dropping a body part to escape from an attacker. Some octopuses can detach an arm that a predator has seized. The arm can grow back.
chromatophore A tiny organ of color in the skin, worked by muscles. Fish, reptiles and amphibians have chromatophores too. Cephalopods work theirs with muscles, and a chameleon gets a similar effect in another way.
crustacean A crab, lobster, shrimp, barnacle or their kin. Krill are crustaceans too. Most crustaceans live in water.
jet propulsion Moving by squirting a stream of water backward. A jetting octopus swims backward, trailing its arms behind it.
lifespan The length of time from hatching or birth to death. Octopuses do not live long. The common octopus lives 1 to 2 years, and the giant Pacific octopus about 3 to 5.
mimicry Passing for a different animal by shape or color. The mimic octopus changes its shape and color to look like dangerous sea snakes or lionfish.
muscle Body tissue that works by shortening and pulling. An octopus is about 90 percent muscle. Its arms have muscles running along them, across them and around them.
neuron One of the cells that nerves and brains are made of. An octopus has over 500 million neurons, about as many as a dog. Two thirds of them are in its arms, not its brain.
prey An animal that ends up as another animal's meal. Octopuses hunt crabs, clams, snails and fish.
solitary Living alone rather than in a group. Most octopuses live alone, but a few kinds are known to live in groups.
statocyst An organ that tells an octopus which way is up. An octopus has two. Each is a small sac holding a mineral lump and sensitive hairs, and the octopus may also use it to hear.
tool use Using an object to get a job done. Octopuses are known to use tools fairly often, which is rare in animals without a backbone. Some stack rocks to make a barrier.

Octopus kinds and their world 12

blue-ringed octopus A small octopus marked with bright blue circles. It lives in tide pools and coral reefs from Japan to Australia. Its rings change color dramatically when it is threatened, a warning that it is extremely venomous.
brooding Guarding and tending eggs until they hatch. A mother octopus cleans her eggs with the tips of her arms and washes them with jets of water. One deep-sea octopus was watched brooding her eggs for 53 months, the longest known for any animal.
coconut octopus A tropical octopus that can walk on two of its arms. It is one of only two kinds of octopus known to walk this way. It also collects coconut shells and seashells to shelter in.
common octopus A well-studied octopus of the Atlantic Ocean. Few octopuses have been studied as much. It may weigh up to 9 kilograms (20 pounds).
crevice A narrow crack in rock. The dens of octopuses are typically crevices in rock. Small kinds may move into empty shells and bottles.
deep sea The sunless water far beneath the waves. It begins where the light starts to fade, about 200 meters (660 feet) down. It is cold, dark and under high pressure, and it is considered the least explored biome on Earth.
dumbo octopus A deep-sea octopus with two ear-like fins. The fins stick out above its eyes. There are 17 kinds, and like the other finned deep-sea octopuses they cannot squirt ink.
giant Pacific octopus The largest octopus, found on North Pacific coasts. Adults usually weigh around 15 kilograms (33 pounds), and the arms can span up to 4.3 meters (14 feet). It does best in cold water.
mimic octopus An Indo-Pacific octopus that poses as other animals. It was first discovered in 1998 off Sulawesi in Indonesia, on the muddy floor of a river mouth.
paralarva A newly hatched octopus adrift among the plankton. Most young octopuses hatch as paralarvae. They do not yet look or live like the adults.
seabed The sand, mud and rock that lie under the sea. Octopuses use their arms to walk across the seabed. Most of the seabed is covered in layers of sediment.
tide pool A pool of salt water that low tide leaves behind. Most are shallow: from a few inches deep to a few feet, and only a few feet wide.

How this list was compiled: Term list chosen for this site on 2026-10-12. Each meaning is written in our own words and was checked that day against the article on the term in the English Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/), whose text is under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license: Octopus, Cephalopod, Mollusca, Cephalopod limb, Sucker (zoology), Cephalopod ink, Mantle (mollusc), Siphon (mollusc), Cephalopod beak, Camouflage, Chromatophore, Mimicry, Tool use by non-human animals, Crustacean, Giant Pacific octopus, Common octopus, Mimic octopus, Blue-ringed octopus, Grimpoteuthis, Amphioctopus marginatus, Graneledone boreopacifica, Seabed, Tide pool, Deep sea, Coleoidea and Cephalopod intelligence. Neuron, autotomy, statocyst, solitary, crevice and lifespan were read in Wiktionary, the free dictionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/). The suckers, the beak, the three hearts, the blue blood, the muscle and the walk across the seabed were checked a second time against the Wildlife Guide of the National Wildlife Federation (https://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Invertebrates/Octopuses); ink, dens and the solitary life against National Geographic Kids (https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/facts/octopus); the giant Pacific octopus and its lifespan against National Geographic (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/facts/giant-pacific-octopus), the Monterey Bay Aquarium (https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/animals-a-to-z/giant-pacific-octopus) and the Animal Diversity Web of the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology (https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Enteroctopus_dofleini/); the common octopus, its camouflage and the care of its eggs against National Geographic (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/invertebrates/facts/common-octopus) and the Animal Diversity Web (https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Octopus_vulgaris/). The fact after each meaning is from the same pages. Licence: own work

How it works

This octopus vocabulary worksheet sets octopus, cephalopod, mollusk, arm, tentacle, sucker, ink, mantle, siphon, beak, camouflage and den beside their meanings, which stand in another order. The answer key prints last.

Read the full guide

Body and behavior

Set opens on Octopus basics. The second set has chromatophore, prey, jet propulsion, muscle, mimicry, neuron, tool use, solitary, crustacean, lifespan, statocyst and autotomy.

Octopus kinds and their world

The third set names six octopuses (giant Pacific, common, mimic, blue-ringed, dumbo and coconut) and where they live and hatch: seabed, tide pool, deep sea, crevice, paralarva and brooding.

Squid, cuttlefish, nautilus, snails and clams are on the mollusks and annelids word search.

Questions and answers

How many hearts does an octopus have?

Three. Two pump blood through the gills and the third pumps it around the rest of the body. The blood is blue, because it carries oxygen with copper where ours uses iron.

What is the plural of octopus?

Octopuses. Octopi is common but is usually considered incorrect, because it treats the word as a kind of Latin noun that it is not. Octopodes, the Ancient Greek plural, has been used too.

How smart is an octopus?

Octopuses are among the most intelligent animals without a backbone. They can solve puzzles that take pushing or pulling, unscrew the lids of containers and open latches to reach the food inside, and they remember the solutions.

Do octopuses have bones?

No. An octopus has no bones, so it can fit through very small spaces, and its arms can squash, stretch, stiffen or coil at any point.

All 36 terms

Octopus basics 12

Octopus basics, continued

Body and behavior 12

Octopus kinds and their world 12

How it works

Body and behavior

Octopus kinds and their world

Questions and answers

More tools