Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of several North American freshwater game fishes of the genus Esox, especially the chain pickerel.
  • noun The walleye.
  • noun Chiefly British A young pike.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun 1. A small or young pike, Esox lucius.
  • noun A kind of pike: so called in the United States.
  • noun A pike-perch or sauger: a commercial name of the dressed fish. See Stizostedion.
  • noun A small wading bird, as a stint, a purre, or a dunlin.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun obsolete A young or small pike.
  • noun Any one of several species of freshwater fishes of the genus Esox, esp. the smaller species.
  • noun The glasseye, or wall-eyed pike. See Wall-eye.
  • noun (Bot.) a blue-flowered aquatic plant (Pontederia cordata) having large arrow-shaped leaves. So called because common in slow-moving waters where pickerel are often found.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A freshwater fish of the genus Esox.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun flesh of young or small pike
  • noun any of several North American species of small pike

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English pikerel, diminutive of pike, pike; see pike.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From pike +‎ -rel.

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Examples

Comments

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  • "Clarence Birdseye... had moved to Labrador with his wife, Eleanor, and their infant son to work as a fur trapper. He found that if he froze greens, they would last through the winter without losing their flavor. He filled his baby's washbasin with salted water, put cabbage in it, and exposed it to Labrador's arctic wind. The Birdseyes were the first people to eat 'fresh' vegetables all winter. This was the beginning of years of home kitchen experiments. ... their son recalled Eleanor's regular irritation at finding food experiments throughout the house. He particularly remembered the fight over live pickerel in the bathtub."

    —Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Penguin, 1997), 134

    July 16, 2009

  • Fish or bird or plant. Now that's multiskilling.

    August 27, 2021