Word.ws English Dictionary

corned beef

corned beef noun: smoke-cured and salted 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

corned beef meaning in Tagalog, Malay, Indonesian and Vietnamese

corned beef in Tagalog

beef conserved in tins
karne norte

corned beef in Malay

smoke-cured and salted beef
konbif
beef conserved in tins
konbif

corned beef in Indonesian

smoke-cured and salted beef
kornet
beef conserved in tins
kornet

corned beef in Vietnamese

smoke-cured and salted beef
thịt bò muối

Forms of corned beef

pluralcorned beefs
alternative formcorn beef
alternative formcorn-beef
alternative formcornbeef
alternative formcorned-beef

Origin of corned beef

From corn (“to preserve (meat) in coarse corns of salt”, verb); (chief officer): rhyming slang for chief.

Words formed from corned beef

Questions about corned beef

What does corned beef mean?
Corned beef means smoke-cured and salted beef.
What is corned beef in Tagalog?
Corned beef in Tagalog is karne norte. See Corned beef meaning in Tagalog.
What part of speech is corned beef?
Corned beef is a noun.
What is the plural of corned beef?
The plural of corned beef is corned beefs.

Words near corned beef in the dictionary

  1. corneal-cerebellar syndrome
  2. corneally
  3. corneas
  4. Cornec
  5. corned
  6. corned beef
  7. corned beefs
  8. corned-out
  9. Corneillean
  10. Corneillian
  11. cornein

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: 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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-corned beef.wav.

Cite this entry: “corned beef.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/corned_beef. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.