Meaning of Mackerel | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Certain smaller edible fish, principally true mackerel and Spanish mackerel in family Scombridae, often speckled,
   countable, uncountable
2. A pimp; also, a bawd.
   obsolete
3. typically Scomber scombrus in the British isles.
   countable, uncountable
4. A true mackerel, any fish of tribe Scombrini (Scomber spp., Rastrelliger spp.)
   countable, uncountable
5. Certain other similar small fish in families Carangidae, Gempylidae, and Hexagrammidae.
   countable, uncountable
6. A regular pattern, similar to fish scales, of undulating small clouds with sky visible between them.
   attributive, countable, uncountable

Equivalents

Examples

“[…] you may buy land now as cheap as stinking mackerel.”

“I am living fast, to see the Time, when a Book that misses its Tide, shall be neglected, as the Moon by Day, or like Mackarel a Week after the Season.”

“Philander went into the next room[…]and came back with a salt mackerel that dripped brine like a rainstorm. Then he put the coffee pot on the stove and rummaged out a loaf of dry bread and some hardtack.”

“He sometimes pinches the maids till their arms are as many colours as a mackerel’s back.”

“1982, Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Chapter 5, in Zami; Sister Outsider; Undersong, New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993, p. 47, “ […] if you ever so much as breathe a word about my stories, Sandman’s comin’ after you the very same minute to pluck out you eyes like a mackerel for soup.””

“a mackerel sky”

“MACKEREL CLOUDS.- Mackerel scales and mares' tails / Make lofty ships carry low sails.”

“Mackerel clouds in sky, Expect more wet than dry. A mackerel sky, Not twenty-four hours dry.”

“Mackerel in the sky, three days dry. […] Mackerel sky, mackerel sky - never long wet, never long dry.”

“1483, William Caxton, Magnus Cato, quoted in James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century, vol. 2, publ. by John Russell Smith (1847), page 536. […] nyghe his hows dwellyd a maquerel or bawde […]”

“NETTING MACKEREL: THE PIMP DETAIL”

“Hundreds of ‘night birds’ and their ‘mackerels’ and other vice-pushers were sent packing.”

“2006, Paul Crowley, Message-ID: in humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare https://web.archive.org/web/20201001221812/https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare/VarPp2-HSO0/QuMJdNOwfisJ A procurer or a pimp is a broker (or broker-between), a mackerel, or a pandar; the last is not necessarily-and, indeed, not usually-a professional.”

“You can't 'work' in a legal brothel without mackerel.”

“Perhaps, but my sources think the mackerel knew of this girl but she didn't know of him.”

CEFR level