Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- n. A young Atlantic salmon on its first return from the sea to fresh or brackish waters.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. A young salmon after its first return from the sea.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. A young salmon after its first return from the sea.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A young salmon on its first return to the river from the sea.
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Examples
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"Some of them are much larger than small salmon; but by the term grilse I mean young salmon that have only been once to sea.
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 333, July 1843
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A grilse is a young salmon returning from the sea to fresh water for the first time - true or false?
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Most of the salmon caught are known as grilse -- small, mostly male salmon that feed only a few hundred kilometres away from their home rivers.
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In the third stage, after its return from the sea to its native river, it is called a "grilse," and weighs from three to six pounds.
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But in those places, their absence didn't seem pretentious, as it did in the third one-star eatery, Plumed Horse (www. plumedhorse.co.uk) — for here both the bread and the grilse (young salmon) were undersalted to my taste.
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But there was still a grilse that rose to a big March brown in the shrunken stream below Elibank.
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Atlantic salmon native to Maine rivers had virtually no grilse in their spawning runs.
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From area to area and year to year, spawning runs have grilse and older adults in different proportions.
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In some Irish rivers, virtually all the salmon spawning or the first time are grilse.
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There are both males and females among Atlantic salmon grilse, unlike the steelhead and coho salmon “jacks,” fish that return to spawn before spending a winter in the ocean, which are almost all males.
chained_bear commented on the word grilse
"Intrepid anglers, travelling by train from St. John's and Port aux Basques, ate poached salmon and pan-fried grilse and char—sold by local fishermen to the railway cooks for nine cents a pound."
—David Macfarlane, The Danger Tree, 62
May 6, 2008