gizzard
pronunciation
How to pronounce gizzard in British English:
UK [ˈgɪzəd]
How to pronounce gizzard in American English:
US [ˈgɪzərd]
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- Noun:
- thick-walled muscular pouch below the crop in many birds and reptiles for grinding food
Word Origin
- gizzard
- gizzard: [14] Latin gigeria denoted the ‘cooked entrails of poultry’, something of a delicacy in ancient Rome (the word may have been borrowed from Persian jigar). This produced a Vulgar Latin *gicerium, which passed into Old French as giser. English acquired it, but did not change it from giser to gizzard until the 16th century (the addition of a so-called ‘parasitic’ d or t to the end of a word also accounts for pilchard, varmint, and the now obsolete scholard for scholar, among others).
- gizzard (n.)
- "stomach of a bird," late 14c., from Old French gisier "entrails, giblets (of a bird)" (13c., Modern French gésier), probably from Vulgar Latin *gicerium, dissimilated from Latin gigeria (neuter plural) "cooked entrails of a fowl," a delicacy in ancient Rome, from PIE *yekwr- "liver" (see hepatitis). Parasitic -d added 1500s (perhaps on analogy of -ard words). Later extended to other animals, and, jocularly, to human beings (1660s).
Example
- 1. It is as if a thinker submitted himself to be rasped by the great gizzard of creation .
- 2. From here it travels to the muscular gizzard .
- 3. Politics is , as it were , the gizzard of society , full of grit and gravel , and the two political parties are its two opposite halves , - sometimes split into quarters , it may be , which grind on each other .
- 4. The first part of the alimentary canal of an arthropod or annelid , which includes the buccal cavity , esophagus , crop , and gizzard .
- 5. I 'll slice your gizzard open !