salmon
/ˈsæmən/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.01 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
6
Letters
2
Syllables
6
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
One of several species of fish, typically of the Salmoninae subfamily, brownish above with silvery sides and delicate pinkish-orange flesh; they ascend rivers to spawn.
Countable; Uncountable
adj
Example Sentences
- "grilled salmon"
- "salmon paté"
- "salmon steak"
- "Got any salmon?"
- "Tinned mackerel is confusingly called ‘salmon’ in Sri Lanka. So this dish, in Sinhalese, is salmon hodi, or salmon in gravy. Now that I think on it, all tinned fish in Sri Lanka is called salmon."
- "With a thick gravy made up of onions, tomatoes, spices, and coconut milk this Sri Lankan salmon curry might breathe new life to those canned mackerels on your shelf."
Etymology
From Middle English samoun, samon, saumon, from Anglo-Norman saumon, from Old French saumon, from Latin salmō, salmōn-. Widely displaced native Middle English lax, from Old English leax (whence modern dialectal lax). The unpronounced l was later inserted to make the word appear closer to its Latin root (compare words like debt, indict, receipt for the same spelling Latinizations). The verb sense “ride a bicycle the wrong way down a one-way street” alludes to salmon swimming upstream against the flow of a river to spawn.
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈsæmən/
- British English: /ˈsæmən/
Usage
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
Phrases
Atlantic salmon
Australian salmon
bay salmon
beaked salmon
black salmon
blueback salmon
Brazilian salmon pink tarantula
Burnett salmon