Word.ws English Dictionary

cod liver

cod liver noun: the liver of codfish.

cod liver: the liver of codfish
Image: A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

cod liver (countable and uncountable, plural cod livers)

  1. The liver of codfish.
    • The menhaden ester fractions were worked up more thoroughly than the cod liver esters, but it was assumed, on the basis of the indicated similarity, that the cod liver oil possessed essentially the same composition as the menhaden. […] Bell (1851) wrote that pigs which ate cod livers became very...1927, Charles E. Bills, “The Principal Chemical Researches on Cod Liver Oil”, in W[illiam] A[lbert] Noyes, editor, Chemical Reviews, volume III, Baltimore, Md., pages 430 and 432
    • Community Chick Mash / Yellow corn meal or hominy, feeding oat meal, wheat bran, wheat middlings, red dog middlings, alfalfa meal, dried milk, choice meat scraps, fish meal, precipitated bone meal, calcium carbonate, cod liver meal, cod liver oil, salt.1937 November, Philip H. Smith, Inspection of Commercial Feedstuffs (Massachusetts Agricultural Experiment Station, Control Series, Bulletin No. 89), Amherst, Mass.: Massachusetts State College, page...

Examples of cod liver in a sentence

  • They ate cod and cod livers by preference, because this was a fatty, tasty dish and not too expensive.1952, Curt Riess, “The City That Is Different”, in The Berlin Story, New York, N.Y.: The Dial Press, →LCCN, page 261:
  • They spent 40 days aboard Soviet vessel off Southern Labrador and observed fishing and processing of cod and ocean perch into fillets, canned cod liver, cod-liver oil, dressed cod and perch, and meal.1967 March, “Japanese Technicians Observe Soviet North Atlantic Operations”, in Commercial Fisheries Review, volume 29, number 3, page 25...
  • Canned cod liver is available any place, as are smoked flounder and German caviar, not to mention a wide selection of sardines.1970, LaVern Rippley, “German Food”, in Of German Ways, Minneapolis, Minn.: Dillon Press, Inc., published 1973, →ISBN, page 252:
  • It was the height of the cod season, and the south shore was lined with stages and flakes for heading, splitting, and drying fish, vats for rendering cod livers into oil.1999, Annamarie Beckel, All Gone Widdun, St. John’s, N.L.: Breakwater Books, →ISBN, page 23:

Forms of cod liver

pluralcod livers
alternative formcodliver
alternative form (rare)cod-liver

Words formed from cod liver

Questions about cod liver

What does cod liver mean?
Cod liver means the liver of codfish.
How do you use cod liver in a sentence?
They ate cod and cod livers by preference, because this was a fatty, tasty dish and not too expensive.
What part of speech is cod liver?
Cod liver is a noun.
What is the plural of cod liver?
The plural of cod liver is cod livers.

Words near cod liver in the dictionary

  1. cod end
  2. cod ends
  3. cod Latin
  4. cod line
  5. cod lines
  6. cod liver
  7. cod liver oil
  8. cod liver oils
  9. cod livers
  10. cod psychologist
  11. cod psychologists

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cod liver (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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