mackerel

plural mackerels

1. countableuncountableCertain smaller edible fish, principally true mackerel and Spanish mackerel in family Scombridae, often speckled,
   1. countableuncountableTypically Scomber scombrus in the British isles.

      […] you may buy land now as cheap as stinking mackerel.

      c. 1597 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Fourth, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act II, scene iv]

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      I am living fast, to see the Time, when a Book that misses its Tide, shall be neglected, as the Moon by Day, or like Mackarel a Week after the Season.

      1704, [Jonathan Swift], A Tale of a Tub. […], London: […] John Nutt, […], →OCLC, page 215

      Philander went into the next room[…]and came back with a salt mackerel that dripped brine like a rainstorm. Then he put the coffee pot on the stove and rummaged out a loaf of dry bread and some hardtack.

      1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VIII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC

      He sometimes pinches the maids till their arms are as many colours as a mackerel’s back.

      1926, Hope Mirrlees, chapter 6, in Lud-in-the-Mist, London: Millennium, published 2000, page 68

      1982, Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Chapter 5, in Zami; Sister Outsider; Undersong, New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1993, p. 47, “ […] if you ever so much as breathe a word about my stories, Sandman’s comin’ after you the very same minute to pluck out you eyes like a mackerel for soup.”

2. countableuncountableA true mackerel, any fish of tribe Scombrini (Scomber spp., Rastrelliger spp.)
3. countableuncountableCertain other similar small fish in families Carangidae, Gempylidae, and Hexagrammidae.
4. attributivecountableuncountablethe sky; etc; the sky; etcA regular pattern, similar to fish scales, of undulating small clouds with sky visible between them.

   a mackerel sky

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   MACKEREL CLOUDS.- Mackerel scales and mares' tails / Make lofty ships carry low sails.

   1892, George Scott, Scott's New Coast Pilot for the Lakes: Containing a Complete List of All the Lights and Light-houses, Fog Signals and Buoys on Both the American and Canadian Shores, page 277

   Mackerel clouds in sky, Expect more wet than dry. A mackerel sky, Not twenty-four hours dry.

   1908, The Journal of Geography, page 201

   Mackerel in the sky, three days dry. […] Mackerel sky, mackerel sky - never long wet, never long dry.

   2018 May 27, Nick Wigram, Get Off of My Cloud, Nick Wigram

plural mackerels

1. obsoleteA pimp; also, a bawd.

   NETTING MACKEREL: THE PIMP DETAIL

   1980, The Police Journal, Volume 53 (page 257) doi:10.1177/0032258X8005300305 (also available at Google books)

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   1483, William Caxton, Magnus Cato, quoted in James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century, vol. 2, publ. by John Russell Smith (1847), page 536. […] nyghe his hows dwellyd a maquerel or bawde […]

   Hundreds of ‘night birds’ and their ‘mackerels’ and other vice-pushers were sent packing.

   1981, Peter Gammond, Raymond Horricks, Big Bands, page 15

   2006, Paul Crowley, Message-ID: in humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare https://web.archive.org/web/20201001221812/https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare/VarPp2-HSO0/QuMJdNOwfisJ A procurer or a pimp is a broker (or broker-between), a mackerel, or a pandar; the last is not necessarily-and, indeed, not usually-a professional.

   You can't 'work' in a legal brothel without mackerel.

   2009, Jeffery Klaehn, Roadblocks to Equality, →ISBN, page 118

   Perhaps, but my sources think the mackerel knew of this girl but she didn't know of him.

   2012, J. Robert Janes, Mayhem, →ISBN