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sushi

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈsuːʃi//
  • Canada//ˈsuʃi//
  • Scotland//ˈsʉʃe//
  • Scotland//ˈsʉʃɪ//
  • Scotland//ˈsʉʃi//

A Japanese dish made of small portions of sticky white rice flavored with vinegar, usually wrapped in seaweed and filled or topped with fish, vegetables or meat.

noun

  1. 1

    A Japanese dish made of small portions of sticky white rice flavored with vinegar, usually wrapped in seaweed and filled or topped with fish, vegetables or meat.

    For the vegetarians, she served cucumber sushi.

    He went to a Japanese restaurant and ordered sushi and noodles.

    Suzuributa.—Mashed fish, eggs, 'sushi' of shrimps, plum cake, black mushroom, plum, and finely cut orange.

    Not long ago a newspaper reporter came to interview me on the subject of unusual foods, and I described to him the persimmon-leaf sushi made by the people who live deep in the mountains of Yoshino—and which I shall take the opportunity to introduce to you here.

  2. 2

    rareOne of the portions from this dish.

    You will recall that, contrary to the relative appearance of the words, the sashimi are the simple raw fish slices and the sushi are the rolls of rice and raw fish.

    Rusty put a sushi in her palm. / Mary Kate popped it into her mouth. It tasted salty and crunchy. “Cucumber!” she said. / “My grandmother puts a surprise in the middle of each one,” said Rusty.

    I reach out and pop a sushi into my mouth while I’m waiting for someone to answer a question.

    Startled by the venom, Erik almost dropped a sushi into his mixture of soy sauce and wasabi.

  3. 3

    Raw fish, especially as a Japanese dish.

    'Can't eat sushi?' I said. Then Mom said, 'You can't eat uncooked fish when you're pregnant' as if I'm the one stupid enough to go and get pregnant!

Etymology

Borrowed from Japanese 寿司(すし) (sushi, “sushi (sour rice)”), ultimately from archaic conjugation 酸(す)し (sushi, “sour, vinegared”) of modern adjective 酸(す)い (sui, “sour, vinegared”).

verb

  1. 1

    informalTo prepare (a food) as sushi.

    Our finned friends come in all varieties: sushi-ed, fresh, smoked and otherwise packaged for your consumption.

Forms

plural
sushis
past tense
sushied
past participle
sushied
present participle
sushiing
third person singular
sushis
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).