Meaning

Certain smaller edible fish, principally true mackerel and Spanish mackerel in family Scombridae, often speckled,.

Definitions by Sense

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

Example Sentences

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

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.

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

Word Forms

• mackerel
• mackerels

Related Words

When Should You Use Mackerel?

Use mackerel when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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