Word.ws English Dictionary

corn beef

corn beef is the alternative form of corned beef.

Meaning of corned beef

Noun

corned beef (countable and uncountable, plural corned beefs)

  1. Smoke-cured and salted beef.
  2. Beef conserved in tins (cans).
    • Here’s a grocery list of foods Chestnut has eaten competitively, drawn from his Major League Eating bio: apple pie, asparagus, boysenberry pie, brats, burritos, chicken spiedies (a kind of sandwich), chicken wings, chili, corned beef sandwiches, eggs, fish tacos, funnel cake, grilled cheese...2015 July 2, Michael Pearson, “6 things to know about hot dog king Joey Chestnut”, in CNN
  3. (UK, historical, slang) The chief officer of a prison.
    • Steve and I raced for the building and began climbing the wall, before any of the screws knew what was happening. […] The Corned Beef came out first and initiated the ploy to get us down.1999, Alex Alexandrowicz, David Wilson, The Longest Injustice: The Strange Story of Alex Alexandrowicz

Forms of corn beef

pluralcorn beefs
alternative formcorn-beef
alternative formcornbeef

Origin of corn beef

Lexicalization of a reduced pronunciation of corned beef with regular deletion of -d before b. Compare ice cream and mash potato.

Questions about corn beef

What is corn beef the alternative form of?
Corn beef is the alternative form of corned beef.

Words near corn beef in the dictionary

  1. Cormoș
  2. corms
  3. cormus
  4. corn
  5. corn aphid
  6. corn beef
  7. corn beefs
  8. corn blotch leafminer
  9. corn blotch leafminers
  10. corn borer
  11. corn borers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: corn beef (page history and authors); corned beef (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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Cite this entry: “corn beef.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/corn_beef. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.