offal

See also: ôffal

English

Etymology

From Middle English offal, offall, offalle (“offal, refuse, scrap waste”), equivalent to off- +‎ fall. Cognate with Saterland Frisian Oufal (“offal”), West Frisian ôffal (“offal”), Dutch afval (“waste, refuse”), German Low German Offall (“offal”), German Abfall (“waste, refuse”), Danish affald (“waste, refuse”), Swedish avfall (“waste, refuse”), Old English offeallan (“to cut off”).

Pronunciation

Noun

offal (countable and uncountable, plural offals)

  1. The internal organs of an animal (entrails or innards), used as food.
    Synonyms: fancy meat, variety meat
  2. A by-product of the grain milling process, which may include bran, husks, etc.
    • 1817, John Taylor, Arator; Being a Series of Agricultural Essays Practical and Political in Sixty-One Numbers, Baltimore: John M. Carter, No. 32, Indian Corn, p. 96, [1]
      The whole of the corn offal is better food than wheat straw, but its blades and tops are so greatly superiour, that cattle prefer them to hay, and will fatten on them as well.
    • 1918, Alonzo Englebert Taylor, War Bread‎[2], New York: Macmillan, page 75:
      Our standard wheat flour contains only the endosperm and represents practically a 75 per cent. extraction. The remaining 25 per cent. is known in the trade as grain offal or mill-feed, and is used largely as a concentrated food for live stock, being prized in the feeding of dairy cattle.
    • 1941, Wheat Studies of the Food Research Institute‎[3], volume 18, Stanford University, page 96:
      […] the fragments are broken down and the finer particles are collected by sieving; finally, there is the bolting of the assembled fine fractions, with exclusion of the wheat offal which includes bran and a number of other commercial fractions like red dog and shorts.
  3. A dead body; carrion.
  4. That which is thrown away as worthless or unfit for use; refuse; rubbish.

Derived terms

Translations

See also

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