Cockle-bread

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Bread made from wild grain. obsolete, uncountable

    "When St. Bernard founded his abbey, near Clairvaux, he and his thirteen companions lived on barley, or cockle-bread, with boiled beech leaves as vegetables, while they were employed grubbing up the forest, and in building huts for their habitation."

  2. 2
    A form of bread used as a love charm, variously described as being kneaded with the knees or buttocks, or simply shaped to look like buttocks. uncountable

    "Fair maiden, white and red, Comb me smooth and stroke my head, And though shalt have some cockle-bread."

Example

More examples

"When St. Bernard founded his abbey, near Clairvaux, he and his thirteen companions lived on barley, or cockle-bread, with boiled beech leaves as vegetables, while they were employed grubbing up the forest, and in building huts for their habitation."

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.