Flitch
noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The flank or side of an animal, now almost exclusively a pig when cured and salted; a side of bacon.
"The following morning before Nicholas awoke, Mulvey walked all the way to the village of Letterfrack, returning with a basket of cabbages and a flitch of bacon, two loaves of fresh bread and a plump broiling chicken."
- 2 salted and cured abdominal wall of a side of pork wordnet
- 3 A piece or strip cut off of something else, generally a piece of wood (timber).
"The Measure of a shell or Flitch of Timber. If a piece be taken out of the middle of a round piece of Timber from end to end; there will be left two pieces, which they call Shells or Flitches."
- 4 fish steak usually cut from a halibut wordnet
- 1 To cut into, or off in, flitches or strips. transitive
"to flitch logs"
Example
More examples"The following morning before Nicholas awoke, Mulvey walked all the way to the village of Letterfrack, returning with a basket of cabbages and a flitch of bacon, two loaves of fresh bread and a plump broiling chicken."
Etymology
From Middle English flicche, from Old English fliċċe (“side of an animal, flitch”), from Proto-Germanic *flikkiją (“side, flitch”), from Proto-Indo-European *pleh₁ḱ- (“to tear, peel off”). Cognate with Low German flikke, French flèche, Icelandic flikki (“flitch”), Middle Low German vlicke.
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.