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kipper: msg#00014culture.language.word-of-the-day
**************************************************************** Planning to catch some Zs this summer? Check out the new fourth edition of The Official SCRABBLE(R) Players Dictionary! http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/book.pl?scrabdic.htm&3 **************************************************************** The Word of the Day for July 15 is: kipper \KIP-er\ noun 1 : a male salmon or sea trout during or after the spawning season *2 : a kippered herring or salmon Example sentence: The traditional British breakfast of kippers and eggs was threatened in the 1980s, when overfishing by foreign ships seriously depleted herring stocks in the North Sea. Did you know? An American visiting Scotland once reported to _The New York Times_ that "a kipper is prepared by taking a herring fresh (no more than 24 hours out of the water), plump, oily (15 percent or more fat content is best), soaking it in a saltwater brine and smoking it slowly over a fire composed of oak chips." This process of creating a kipper (called "kippering") goes back to at least the 18th century, but the word "kipper" dates all the way back to before the 12th century, when it was spelled "cypera" and was used specifically to mean "a spawning salmon." "Cypera" is related to the Old English word for copper ("coper") and may have been suggested by the salmon's color. *Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence. |
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