eel

C2 Topic:Animals
US /iːl/
noun Freq #13536

Meanings

  1. 1
    noun

    Any freshwater fish of the order Anguilliformes, which are elongated and resemble snakes.

    Off the United States, the National Marine Fisheries Service is helping industry explore fisheries for deep shrimp, rattails, chimeras, orange roughy, smoothheads, slackjaw eels, blue hake, skates and dogfish, which the National Fisheries Institute, an industry group, in an effort to improve their marketability, has renamed cape shark.

  2. 2
    noun

    Someone or something that is sneaky and/or hard to catch.

    That Dennis is a right eel, he always seems to slip away from the scene at the right time.

  3. 3
    noun

    voracious snakelike marine or freshwater fishes with smooth slimy usually scaleless skin and having a continuous vertical fin but no ventral fins

  4. 4
    noun

    the fatty flesh of eel

Thesaurus

Word family
Derived forms cusk-eeleel-blennyeel-likeeel-pouteelblennyeelboateelbuckeelereeleryeelfareeelfisheelgrass
Related forms elver

Etymology

From Middle English el (“eel”), from Old English ǣl (“eel”), from Proto-West Germanic *āl (“eel”), from Proto-Germanic *ēlaz (“eel”), which is of unknown origin. Cognates Cognate with West Frisian iel (“eel”), Dutch aal (“eel”), German Low German Aal, Ool (“eel”), German Aal (“eel”), Danish, Norn, Norwegian, and Swedish ål (“eel”), Faroese állur, álur (“eel”), Icelandic áll (“eel”).

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