salmon

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   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

2. 2
   noun

   snout (tobacco; from salmon and trout)

   Got any salmon?

3. 3
   noun

   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.

4. 4
   adj

   Having a pale pinkish-orange colour.

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

5. 5
   verb

   To 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."

6. 6
   adj

   of orange tinged with pink

7. 7
   noun

   any of various large food and game fishes of northern waters

8. 8
   noun

   a pale pinkish orange color

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.