Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use mackerel in a sentence

33 example sentences · noun

Mackerel means certain smaller edible fish, principally true mackerel and Spanish mackerel in family Scombridae, often speckled,. Example: “The divers encountered a huge school of mackerel.”

Examples of mackerel by meaning

nounTypically Scomber scombrus in the British isles.

  • He sometimes pinches the maids till their arms are as many colours as a mackerel’s back.1926, Hope Mirrlees, chapter 6, in Lud-in-the-Mist, London: Millennium, published 2000, page 68
  • Waitrose has become the first UK supermarket to suspend the sale of mackerel because of overfishing and will start pointing customers toward herring and other species.2026 February 26, Tara Russell, “Waitrose to halt the sale of mackerel because of overfishing”, in The Guardian, page 9

nounA regular pattern, similar to fish scales, of undulating small clouds with sky visible between them.

  • a mackerel sky
  • Mackerel clouds in sky, Expect more wet than dry.1908, The Journal of Geography, page 201

nounA pimp; also, a bawd.

  • NETTING MACKEREL: THE PIMP DETAIL1980, The Police Journal, Volume 53 (page 257) doi:10.1177/0032258X8005300305 (also available at Google books)
  • Hundreds of ‘night birds’ and their ‘mackerels’ and other vice-pushers were sent packing.1981, Peter Gammond, Raymond Horricks, Big Bands, page 15
  • You can't 'work' in a legal brothel without mackerel.2009, Jeffery Klaehn, Roadblocks to Equality, →ISBN, page 118

More sentences with mackerel

  • The divers encountered a huge school of mackerel.From the entry school
  • The fish factory cans the sardines and mackerel.From the entry cans
  • “I’ve already granted you usufruct of the dead mackerels floating on the Seine!”2026 [1979], Copi, “The Surprise Party”, in Kit Schluter, transl., City of Rats, New Directions Publishing, →ISBN, page 16. From the entry usufruct
  • Darwin spearo Mitch with a haul off the wrecks - including a 15khg mackerel.2023 May 19, “Tinny Podcast #770: Spearing 15kg fish in two metre visibility. Shoal, bong and bluewater check-in as temps go south.”, in…. From the entry spearo
  • Laid on the creamcheese, waxy mackerel, frozen sewerlids of tomato and onion.2015, Joshua Cohen, Book of Numbers, New York, N.Y.: Random House, →ISBN, pages 1.38 and 1.47. From the entry creamcheese
  • Do not eat shark, swordfish, king mackerel, or tilefish due to their high levels of mercury.2013, Jill J. Grover, Ecological Food for Thought on Seafood, West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, →ISBN, page 26. From the entry shark
  • It's brilliant for a brunchy breakfast, and teams well with grilled salmon, tuna, or mackerel for dinner.2005, Jill Dupleix, Good Cooking: The New Basics, page 32. From the entry team
  • The gempylids, or snake mackerels, are a small group of predatory oceanic or pelagic fish.2002, S. S. Deshpande, Handbook of Food Toxicology, page 696. From the entry gempylid
  • The mackerel is a scombroid fish, like the tuna, and is essentially thunniform.1999, Christopher McGowan, A Practical Guide to Vertebrate Mechanics. From the entry thunniform
  • In some areas our audiences enjoyed the music; in others they were cold as a mackerel.1988, Garvin Bushell, Mark Tucker, chapter 16, in Jazz from the Beginning, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, page 131. From the entry cold as a mackerel
  • In summary, I think that the waterfront situation "stinks like a mackerel in the hot sunlight."1965, Fleet Owner - Volume 60, page 8. From the entry stink like a mackerel
  • Tinned mackerel is confusingly called ‘salmon’ in Sri Lanka.2018 July 29, Chath Ginige, “Spicy Mackerel Curry”, in akkis kitchen (blog), archived from the original on 23 Jul 2019. From the entry salmon
  • That argument stinks like a mackerel in the moonlight!2010, David Crump, The Holding Company. From the entry stink like a mackerel
  • But now they were higher and smaller, settling at last into a mackerel sky like a beach at low tide.1972, Richard Adams, Watership Down, Penguin, published 1974, Part 2, Chapter 25, p. 217. From the entry mackerel sky
  • She was as cold as a mackerel.1942, Raymond Chandler, chapter 27, in The High Window, New York: Knopf, published 1964. From the entry cold as a mackerel
  • As a precaution against losing access to the canteen, many of the prisoners might decide to keep more mackerel under their beds.2016, Charles Wheelan, Naked Money: A Revealing Look at Our Financial System. From the entry mack
  • Cornish peppered mackerel, smoked haddock, Scottish herring and pearl-white skate wings are all laid on a bed of crushed ice at the fishmonger.2007, Leslie Ann Bosher, To the Manor Drawn, Murdoch Books, →ISBN, page 157. From the entry fishmonger
  • A schooling fish of temperate waters, chub mackerel or thimbleeye migrates in much greater numbers to New Jersey than into New York waters .1978, John Laurence McHugh, Jay J. C. Ginter, Fisheries, page 68. From the entry thimbleeye
  • Next he put the mackerel in a fry-pan, and the shanty began to smell like a Banks boat just in from a v'yage.1913, Joseph C[rosby] Lincoln, chapter VIII, in Mr. Pratt’s Patients, New York, N.Y.; London: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC. From the entry smell
  • "Cap'n Ben says that the steamboats and launches are beginning to scarcen the mackerel and that they are not so plentiful this year as usual."1909, Amy Ella Blanchard, Wit's End, page 233. From the entry scarcen
  • With a thick gravy made up of onions, tomatoes, spices, and coconut milk this Sri Lankan salmon curry might breathe new life to those canned mackerels on your shelf.2018, Jehan Yusoof, “Sri Lankan canned fish curry(tin fish).”, in Island Smile (blog), archived from the original on 18 Jun 2025. From the entry salmon
  • At a certain age, however, the Cape horse mackerel in the northern Benguela tend to adopt a more demersal lifestyle, thus entering into the bottom dead zone.2004, Bjørn Erik Axelsen, Jens-Otto Krakstad, Graça Bauleth-D'Almeida, “7: Aggregation dynamics and behaviour of the Cape horse mackerel…. From the entry demersal
  • In general, while the consumption of fresh fish is tending to increase, 60 per cent of consumption consists of sardines, saurel, anchovy and mackerel, that is, very inexpensive fish.1985, Barbara C. Cleveland, Adjustments to Changes in Fisheries Law and Economics, number 269, page 76. From the entry saurel
  • The federal Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency advise women and children to avoid king mackerel, shark, swordfish and tilefish, and limit their consumption of some tuna.2008 January 30, Nick Fox, “Taking Worry Off the Plate”, in The New York Times, archived from the original on 05 May 2021. From the entry tilefish
  • Some days he went out in the currach with her father and her brothers, out past Blue Island and Inishlackan, where the mackerel and sea salmon were fat as piglets.2002, Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea, Vintage, published 2003, page 53. From the entry currach
  • The earlier commercial fisheries of the northern Atlantic waters were mainly of herring and mackerel, taken by nets in the North and Norwegian seas and marketed abroad by Hansard merchants.1975, Carl Ortwin Sauer, “Early Sixteenth Century (1501–1518)”, in Sixteenth Century North America: The Land and the People as Seen by…. From the entry Hansard

Meaning of mackerel

  1. noun Certain smaller edible fish, principally true mackerel and Spanish mackerel in family Scombridae, often speckled,.
  2. noun Typically Scomber scombrus in the British isles.
  3. noun A true mackerel, any fish of tribe Scombrini (Scomber spp., Rastrelliger spp.).

Full definition of mackerel

Questions about mackerel in a sentence

How do you use mackerel in a sentence?
Mackerel is used as a noun. For example: “The divers encountered a huge school of mackerel.”
What is a short sentence with mackerel?
“a mackerel sky”
What does mackerel mean?
Mackerel means certain smaller edible fish, principally true mackerel and Spanish mackerel in family Scombridae, often speckled,.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mackerel (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this page: “How to use mackerel in a sentence.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/sentences/mackerel. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.