flesh

English Online Dictionary. What means flesh‎? What does flesh mean?

English

Etymology

From Middle English flesh, flesch, flæsch, from Old English flǣsċ, from Proto-West Germanic *flaiski, from Proto-Germanic *flaiski, from Proto-Indo-European *pleh₁ḱ- (“to tear, peel off”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /flɛʃ/
• Rhymes: -ɛʃ

Noun

flesh (usually uncountable, plural fleshes)

1. The soft tissue of the body, especially muscle and fat.
   • 1918, Fannie Farmer, Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, Chapter XVII: Poultry and Game:

     The flesh of chicken, fowl, and turkey has much shorter fibre than that of ruminating animals, and is not intermingled with fat,—the fat always being found in layers directly under the skin, and surrounding the intestines.

2. The skin of a human or animal.
3. (by extension) Bare arms, bare legs, bare torso.
4. Animal tissue regarded as food; meat (but sometimes excluding fish).
5. The human body as a physical entity.
6. (religion) The mortal body of a human being, contrasted with the spirit or soul.
   • 1929 January, Bassett Morgan (Grace Jones), Bimini, first published in Weird Tales, reprinted 1949, in Avon Fantasy Reader, Issue 10,

     But death had no gift for me, no power to free me from flesh.

7. (religion) The evil and corrupting principle working in man.
8. The soft, often edible, parts of fruits or vegetables.
9. (obsolete) Tenderness of feeling; gentleness.
10. (obsolete) Kindred; stock; race.
11. A yellowish pink colour; the colour of some Caucasian human skin.

Synonyms

• See also Thesaurus:body

Translations

Verb

flesh (third-person singular simple present fleshes, present participle fleshing, simple past and past participle fleshed)

1. (transitive) To reward (a hound, bird of prey etc.) with flesh of the animal killed, to excite it for further hunting; to train (an animal) to have an appetite for flesh.
2. (transitive) To bury (something, especially a weapon) in flesh.
3. (obsolete) To inure or habituate someone in or to a given practice. [16th–18th c.]
4. (transitive) To glut.
5. (transitive) To put flesh on; to fatten.
6. To remove the flesh from the skin during the making of leather.

Translations

Derived terms

See also

• carrion
• incarnate
• sarcoid
• Appendix:Colors

Anagrams

• Fehls, shelf

Middle English

Alternative forms

• flech, fleesh, fleisch, fleische, fleish, flesch, flesche, fless, flessh
• flæsc, flæsch, flæsh (Early Middle English)

Etymology

Inherited from Old English flǣsċ, from Proto-West Germanic *flaiski, from Proto-Germanic *flaiski, from Proto-Indo-European *pleh₁ḱ- (“to tear, peel off”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /flɛːʃ/, /flɛʃ/

Noun

flesh (uncountable)

1. flesh (especially that of a mammal)
2. (Christianity, theology) A communion wafer
3. (anatomy) A muscle
4. meat, flesh for consumption
5. A human or being
6. The body, physical existence, nature (especially that of a human)
7. sexual intercourse, copulation

Usage notes

Much like with English fish, this word is a collective noun, but can be pluralised to refer to different meats.

Descendants

• English: flesh
• Scots: flesch
• Yola: vleash, vlesh

References

• “flē̆sh, n.”, in MED Online, Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan, 2007, retrieved 2018-04-08.