mackerel

mackerel

English

Pronunciation

  • IPA(key): /ˈmæk(ə)ɹəl/
  • Audio (US):(file)
  • Hyphenation: mack‧e‧rel,
  • mack‧erel
  • Rhymes: -ækɹəl

Etymology 1

From Middle English mackerell, macrell, macrelle, makarell, makerel, makerell, makerelle, makrel, makrell, makyrelle, from Old French maquerel. Further origin unknown.

Noun

mackerel (countable and uncountable, plural mackerel or mackerels)

  1. Certain smaller edible fish, principally true mackerel and Spanish mackerel in family Scombridae, often speckled,
    1. Typically Scomber scombrus in the British isles.
      • c. 1597 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Fourth, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene iv]:
        […] you may buy land now as cheap as stinking mackerel.
      • 1704, [Jonathan Swift], A Tale of a Tub. […], London: […] John Nutt, […], →OCLC, page 215:
        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.
      • 1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VIII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC:
        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.
      • 1926, Hope Mirrlees, chapter 6, in Lud-in-the-Mist‎[1], London: Millennium, published 2000, page 68:
        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,[2]
        “ […] 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.”
      • 2026 February 26, Tara Russell, “Waitrose to halt the sale of mackerel because of overfishing”, in The Guardian‎[3], page 9:
        Waitrose has become the first UK supermarket to suspend the sale of mackerel because of overfishing and will start pointing customers toward herring and other species. The Marine Conservation Society warned last year that stocks were at breaking point owing to overfishing, and it downgraded mackerel from a three to a four on its five-point Good Fish Guide sustainability scale. Kerry Lyne of the MCS praised Waitrose’s move, saying: “To keep favourites like mackerel on the menu, we need support right across the supply chain with fishing kept within sustainable limits.” A University of East Anglia study published in January urged supermarkets to encourage customers to expand their fish diet to include more environmentally friendly and locally caught fish, such as herring and sardines. Last September, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) recommended that mackerel fishing in the north-east Atlantic be cut by 70% to help replenish numbers to a sustainable level after overexploitation. […] In December, the UK agreed to reduce mackerel fishing by 48%, well short of the cut the ICES had called for. […] The latest statistics show that from May, the mackerel catch in the northeast Atlantic will no longer meet the requirements set out by the Sustainable Seafood Coalition. Tagholm called for administrative change: “The responsibility cannot lie entirely with retailers or shoppers. It is the government that sets catch limits, and the government that has failed, year after year, to devise a cogent strategy to end overfishing once and for all. Now, with staple fish like cod and mackerel on the brink of disaster, it must act immediately.” Waitrose will promote the sale of herring, sardines and sea bass as sustainable and nutritious alternatives to mackerel.
  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.
    a mackerel sky
    • 1892, George Scott, Scott's New Coast Pilot for the Lakes: Containing a Complete List of All the Lights and Light-houses, Fog Signals and Buoys on Both the American and Canadian Shores, page 277:
      MACKEREL CLOUDS.- Mackerel scales and mares' tails / Make lofty ships carry low sails.
    • 1908, The Journal of Geography, page 201:
      Mackerel clouds in sky, Expect more wet than dry. A mackerel sky, Not twenty-four hours dry.
    • 2018 May 27, Nick Wigram, Get Off of My Cloud, Nick Wigram:
      Mackerel in the sky, three days dry. […] Mackerel sky, mackerel sky - never long wet, never long dry.
Derived terms
Descendants
  • → Sylheti: ꠝꠦꠇꠞꠥꠟ (mexrul)
Translations
See also

References

Etymology 2

From Middle English makerel, maquerel, from Old French maquerel, from Middle Dutch makelare, makelaer (“broker”) (> makelaar (“broker, peddler”)). See also French maquereau.

Noun

mackerel (plural mackerels)

  1. (obsolete) A pimp; also, a bawd.
    • 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 […]
    • 1980, The Police Journal, Volume 53 (page 257) doi:10.1177/0032258X8005300305 (also available at Google books)
      NETTING MACKEREL: THE PIMP DETAIL
    • 1981, Peter Gammond, Raymond Horricks, Big Bands, page 15:
      Hundreds of ‘night birds’ and their ‘mackerels’ and other vice-pushers were sent packing.
    • 2006, Paul Crowley, Message-ID: <ciGug.11527$j7.319767@news.indigo.ie> in humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare [4]
      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.
    • 2009, Jeffery Klaehn, Roadblocks to Equality‎[5], →ISBN, page 118:
      You can't 'work' in a legal brothel without mackerel.
    • 2012, J. Robert Janes, Mayhem‎[6], →ISBN:
      Perhaps, but my sources think the mackerel knew of this girl but she didn't know of him.
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