salt eel
salt eel noun: an end piece of a rope cut off to be used as a whip.
Noun
salt eel (plural salt eels)
- An end piece of a rope cut off to be used as a whip.
- Up betimes, and with my salt eel went down in the parler and there got my boy and did beat him till I was fain to take breath two or three times …April 24, 1663, Samuel Pepys, Diary of Samuel Pepys
- You mistress Jones, I'll break your bones
If thus you mutiny.
Here's a salt eel, which you soon shall feel,
Unless you soon agree.c. 1694, Henry Purcell, Edward Ravenscroft, “Good neighbour, why?”, in The Canterbury Guests; or, A Bargain, Broken, [Act III, scene v]
- A punishment by whipping.
Forms of salt eel
| plural | salt eels |
|---|
Questions about salt eel
- What does salt eel mean?
- Salt eel means an end piece of a rope cut off to be used as a whip.
- What part of speech is salt eel?
- Salt eel is a noun.
- What is the plural of salt eel?
- The plural of salt eel is salt eels.
Words near salt eel in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: salt eel (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: “salt eel.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/salt_eel. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.