Word.ws English Dictionary

mackerels

mackerels is the plural of mackerel.

Meaning of mackerel

Noun (1)

mackerel (countable and uncountable, plural mackerel or mackerels)

  1. Certain smaller edible fish, principally true mackerel and Spanish mackerel in family Scombridae, often speckled,
    1. Typically Scomber scombrus in the British isles.
      • […] you may buy land now as cheap as stinking mackerel.c. 1597 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The First Part of Henry the Fourth, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and...
  2. A true mackerel, any fish of tribe Scombrini (Scomber spp., Rastrelliger spp.)
  3. Certain other similar small fish in families Carangidae, Gempylidae, and Hexagrammidae.
  4. (attributive, the sky, etc) A regular pattern, similar to fish scales, of undulating small clouds with sky visible between them.
    • a mackerel sky

Noun (2)

mackerel (plural mackerels)

  1. (obsolete) A pimp; also, a bawd.
    • […] nyghe his hows dwellyd a maquerel or bawde […]1483, William Caxton, Magnus Cato, quoted in James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth...

Phrases with mackerels

Questions about mackerels

What is mackerels the plural of?
Mackerels is the plural of mackerel.

Words near mackerels in the dictionary

  1. mackerelers
  2. mackereling
  3. mackerelled
  4. mackerelling
  5. mackerelly
  6. mackerels
  7. Mackereth
  8. Mackeson
  9. Mackesy
  10. Mackey
  11. Mackfall

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mackerels (page history and authors); mackerel (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: “mackerels.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mackerels. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.