Definitions

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

  • noun Fish offal.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To foul with gurry; throw offal upon, as fishing-gear or fishing-grounds.
  • noun Feces.
  • noun Fish-offal.
  • noun In whale-fishing, the refuse resulting from the operations of cutting in and boiling out a whale.
  • noun The refuse of a dissecting-room.
  • noun One of the grades of menhaden-oil: a tradename.
  • noun In India, a small native fort.

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

  • noun Obs. or Local An alvine evacuation; also, refuse matter.
  • noun India A small fort.

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

  • noun India A small fort.
  • noun fishing offal

Etymologies

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

[Originally a whaling term for the refuse left over from processing whale blubber, perhaps from dialectal gurry, diarrhea.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Hindi

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Origin unknown.

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Examples

  • A man, in half-bared arms dotted about the wrists with remnants of what they call gurry-sores, stood at the water's edge, waiting to lend a hand.

    Sweetapple Cove George van Schaick

  • A thick blanket of grease and dust--what her mother used to call "gurry"--coats the appliances.

    Archive 2006-08-27 Miss Snark 2006

  • Still sooner or later the humane thing to do is just fillet them and throw the rack in the gurry bin and move on ….

    Think Progress » Cheney criticizes Sarah Palin for suggesting a ‘war on Iran’ could win Obama reelection. 2010

  • Rather than throw the perfectly edible remains into the gurry been to be sold to the catfood company I elected to bring it home to freegan for something better …

    Think Progress » Drilling Is Not The Solution To Create Jobs And Reduce Reliance On Foreign Oil 2010

  • They, hearing the noise ran away as fast as they could drive, and when they ran away in haste, they would cry, gurry, gurry, speaking deep in the throat.

    A Source Book of Australian History Gwendolen H. [Compiler] Swinburne

  • These were black and glistening with the rain and from them came an odor, acrid and penetrating, of decaying fish in ill-emptied gurry-butts and of putrefying livers oozing out a black oil in open casks.

    Sweetapple Cove George van Schaick

  • As such they were put to all sorts of tasks, work that usually found them at the day's end weary, dirty with fish scales and gurry, and more than a little disgusted.

    Burned Bridges Bertrand W. Sinclair 1926

  • I like to have mud on them about the consistency of gurry -- that is, not too wet -- because then it will all drip off on the way upstairs, and not so dry that it scrapes off on the carpet.

    Love Conquers All Robert Benchley 1917

  • Ves carts everything in that cart from dead cows to gurry barrels.

    The Portygee Joseph Crosby Lincoln 1907

  • They can come home all over gurry, but she's got to have on a clean apron an 'her hair slicked up to the nines.

    Bachelor's Fancy 1904

Comments

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  • fish offal

    February 26, 2007

  • Also the mess remaining from flensing and boiling out a whale.

    November 23, 2007

  • I wasn't just eating curried garlic? *worried*

    November 23, 2007

  • Gurry, so called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but sometimes incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the dark, glutinous substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland or right whale...

    - Melville, Moby-Dick, ch. 94

    July 29, 2008

  • Used generically in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland as a term for any kind of dried fish offal on a cutting table or boat.

    February 16, 2011

  • "4. The refuse of a dissecting-room. The term is said to have been introduced at Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, by Professor Jeffries Wyman, and to have become current there."

    --Century Dictionary

    March 29, 2011

  • Last time I was here I missed "ill-emptied gurry-butt" in the examples.

    February 1, 2016