snoek
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.43 in modern English
9
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
An edible fish, Thyrsites atun, native to South African (Cape), South American and Australian waters, often smoked or salted.
Example Sentences
- "2003, Oceanographic Literature Review, Volume 50, Issues 1-2600, page 348, Snoek (Thyrsites atun) is a valuable commercial species and an important predator of small pelagic fishes in the Benguela ecosystem. The South African population attains 50% sexual maturity at a fork length of ca.73.0 cm (3 years). Spawning occurs offshore during winter-spring, along the shelf break (150-400 m) of the western Agulhas Bank and the South African west coast"
- "My friend Jeffrey Jowell, who grew up in Cape Town, has lived away from South Africa for more than forty years, yearning for snoek the entire time. He thinks about fried snoek and grilled snoek and dried snoek and snoek made into pâté. He may miss smoked snoek most of all. Any mention of snoek—a long, bony fish that looks like a second cousin of a barracuda—triggers memories in Jeffrey of his childhood."
- "Snoek need not be scaled. The scales are very fine and usually slip off during handling."
Etymology
Borrowed from Afrikaans snoek, from Dutch snoek, from Middle Dutch snoec, from Old Dutch *snuoc. Some senses come from or are influenced by Dutch zeesnoek (“barracuda”, literally “sea pike”), a word that Van Riebeeck applied to the Thyrsites atun. Doublet of snook and possibly a distant doublet of snake.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: snoek, snoec, *snuoc
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
Phrases
smoor snoek