Scrod

//skɹɑd// noun, verb

noun, verb ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Any cod, pollock, haddock, or other whitefish. New-England
  2. 2
    young Atlantic cod or haddock especially one split and boned for cooking wordnet
  3. 3
    flesh of young Atlantic cod weighing up to 2 pounds; also young haddock and pollock; often broiled wordnet
Verb
  1. 1
    To shred. transitive
  2. 2
    simple past and past participle of screw (“have sex”) New-England, form-of, humorous, nonstandard, participle, past

Etymology

One theory derives it from scrawed, past participle of Cornwall dialect scraw (“to split and dry fish”), but the further origin of this word seems not to have been traced. Another theory derives it from an obsolete Dutch term: either from schrood (“slice, shred”), from Middle Dutch schrode, schroode, referring to the splitting of the fish; or alternatively from the related schrot (“inferior product, cull”), the scrod being originally a cod too small for filleting. In both of these cases, the word is ultimately cognate to shred. Compare East Frisian schrod (“small or worthless thing; shred”), German Schrott (“scrap”).

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