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salmon

nounadjectiveverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈsæmən//
  • United States//ˈsæmən//
  • United States/[ˈsɛəmən]/
  • Australia//ˈsæmən//
  • //ˈsælmən//

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.

noun

  1. 1

    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.

    grilled salmon

    salmon paté

    salmon steak

  2. 2

    A meal or dish made from this fish.

  3. 3

    A pale pinkish-orange colour, the colour of cooked salmon.

  4. 4

    The upper bricks in a kiln which receive the least heat.

  5. 5

    slangsnout (tobacco; from salmon and trout)

    Got any salmon?

  6. 6

    canned fish, usually mackerel.

    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.

    We manufacture canned markerel fish (salmon)

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.

adjective

  1. 1

    Having a pale pinkish-orange colour.

    Smiley and Guillam perched disconsolately beneath it, on a bench of salmon velvet.

verb

  1. 1

    slangTo ride a bicycle the wrong way down a one-way street.

    2014: "Salmon, Don't Shoal: Learning The Lingo Of Safe Cycling" by Marc Silver, NPR Some cities discourage salmoning with clever signage, like this in London: "If you can read this you are biking the wrong way."

Forms

plural
salmons
past tense
salmoned
past participle
salmoned
present participle
salmoning
third person singular
salmons
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).