1. Word finder
  2. Word definitions
  3. pilchard

Find the word definition

What is "pilchard"

Crossword clues for pilchard

pilchard
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
pilchard
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Each Looe family would stock up, taking up to two thousand pilchards for the Winter.
▪ Hard times for the hake and pilchard, next on the U.S. shopping list.
▪ He had bought three large tins of pilchards.
▪ He tried two of the pilchard keys in the lock and put one away immediately.
▪ Local fishermen remember times when shoals of pilchards stretched for miles.
▪ October came and with it the hake, caught with the pilchard nets but some also on hook and line.
▪ Other pilchards were kept for home consumption.
▪ Sprat sandals, tuna trainers, cod court shoes pilchard pumps or perhaps even bream brogues.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Pilchard

Pilchard \Pil"chard\, n. [Cf. It. pilseir, W. pilcod minnows.] (Zo["o]l.) A small European food fish ( Clupea pilchardus) resembling the herring, but thicker and rounder. It is sometimes taken in great numbers on the coast of England.

Fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings.
--Shak.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
pilchard

fish of the herring family, 1540s, earlier pilcher (1520s), of unknown origin. The -d- is "excrescent" [OED].

Wiktionary
pilchard

n. Any of various small oily fish related to herrings, family Clupeidae.

WordNet
pilchard

  1. n. small fatty fish usually canned [syn: sardine]

  2. small fishes found in great schools along coasts of Europe; smaller and rounder than herring [syn: sardine, Sardina pilchardus]

Wikipedia
Pilchard (disambiguation)

A pilchard, or sardine, is a small, oily fish related to the herring, family Clupeidae

Pilchard may also refer to:

  • European pilchard, Sardina pilchardus, true sardine
  • South American pilchard, Sardinops sagax, Pacific sardine, California sardine, Chilean sardine, South African sardine
  • HMS Pilchard, a Royal Navy Ballahoo-class schooner
  • Pilchard the Cat, a paradoxically-named character from the Bob the Builder television series

Usage examples of "pilchard".

Antarctic deep-ocean water carries nutrients which feed economically important fisheries in many parts of the world - Argentine hake, Brazilian tuna, South African pilchard and the remnants of the Peruvian anchoveta fishery.

The flat concrete benches were ashine with bream and gilthead, pilchards, sardines and mackerel.

Other boats were out, mostly taking pilchards and mullet, but the fishermen had no eyes for anything but their work.

When it was autumn and the winter wind began to blow, the pilchards came in their thousands and swam through the musical box.

We'd had a fair haul of pilchard, stockfish and maasbanker, but not what I was hoping for when we met that elusive marriage-point of plankton and tropic waters.

The pilchard fishermen and lobster-pot men with whom he had been having furtive dealings and on whom he had been lavishing British gold - French gold, to be exact - would meet with short shrift if their activities became known to the French authorities.

Several years later I learned that MI6 was lacking in officers with sufficient technical expertise to understand the increasingly scientific nature of its work and Pilchard, like the other university talent-spotters, had been briefed to look out for science graduates - which was probably another reason he approached me.