mackerel

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)Certain smaller edible fish, principally true mackerel and Spanish mackerel in family Scombridae, often speckled,
2. (countable, uncountable)Certain smaller edible fish, principally true mackerel and Spanish mackerel in family Scombridae, often speckled,

   “[…] you may buy land now as cheap as stinking mackerel.”

   “I am living fast, to see the Time, when a Book that misses its Tide, shall be neglected, as the Moon by Day, or like Mackarel a Week after the Season.”

   “Philander went into the next room[…]and came back with a salt mackerel that dripped brine like a rainstorm. Then he put the coffee pot on the stove and rummaged out a loaf of dry bread and some hardtack.”

   “He sometimes pinches the maids till their arms are as many colours as a mackerel’s back.”

   “1982, Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Chapter 5, in Zami; Sister Outsider; Undersong, New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993, p. 47, “ […] if you ever so much as breathe a word about my stories, Sandman’s comin’ after you the very same minute to pluck out you eyes like a mackerel for soup.””

3. (countable, uncountable)A true mackerel, any fish of tribe Scombrini (Scomber spp., Rastrelliger spp.)
4. (countable, uncountable)Certain other similar small fish in families Carangidae, Gempylidae, and Hexagrammidae.
5. (attributive, countable, uncountable)A regular pattern, similar to fish scales, of undulating small clouds with sky visible between them.

   “a mackerel sky”

   “MACKEREL CLOUDS.- Mackerel scales and mares' tails / Make lofty ships carry low sails.”

   “Mackerel clouds in sky, Expect more wet than dry. A mackerel sky, Not twenty-four hours dry.”

   “Mackerel in the sky, three days dry. […] Mackerel sky, mackerel sky - never long wet, never long dry.”

6. (obsolete)A pimp; also, a bawd.

   “1483, William Caxton, Magnus Cato, quoted in James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century, vol. 2, publ. by John Russell Smith (1847), page 536. […] nyghe his hows dwellyd a maquerel or bawde […]”

   “NETTING MACKEREL: THE PIMP DETAIL”

   “Hundreds of ‘night birds’ and their ‘mackerels’ and other vice-pushers were sent packing.”

   “2006, Paul Crowley, Message-ID: in humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare https://web.archive.org/web/20201001221812/https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare/VarPp2-HSO0/QuMJdNOwfisJ A procurer or a pimp is a broker (or broker-between), a mackerel, or a pandar; the last is not necessarily-and, indeed, not usually-a professional.”

   “You can't 'work' in a legal brothel without mackerel.”