Pickle
Pronunciation
- Rhymes: -ɪkəl
Origin 1
From Middle English pikel, pykyl, pekille, pigell ("spicy sauce served with meat or fish"), from Middle Dutch pekel ("brine"). Cognate with Scots pikkill ("salt liquor, brine"), Eastern Frisian pekel, päkel ("pickle, brine"), Dutch pekel ("pickle, brine"), Low German pekel, peckel, pickel, bickel ("pickle, brine"), German Pökel ("pickle, brine").
Alternative forms
- pickel obsolete and rare
Noun
pickle
(plural pickles)- A cucumber preserved in a solution, usually a brine or a vinegar syrup.A pickle goes well with a hamburger.
- (Often in plural: pickles), any vegetable preserved in vinegar and consumed as relish.
- The brine used for preserving food.This tub is filled with the pickle that we will put the small cucumbers into.
- A difficult situation, peril.The climber found himself in a pickle when one of the rocks broke off.
- 1955, Rex Stout, "Die Like a Dog", in , October 1994 edition, ISBN 0553249592, page 194:I beg you, Miss Jones, to realize the pickle' you're in.
- An affectionate term for a mildly mischievous loved one
- 1867, Polly Stubbs, Nursery times; or, Stories about the little ones, by an old nurse, by degrees my little pickle (who, as I told you at the beginning of the story, was the most troublesome child I ever came across) turned into a very well-behaved young gentleman.
- 1885, Eleanor A. Bulley, Great Britain for little Britons‎, ... If you could get my little pickle to learn his multiplication table before you leave us, you shall have that musical box to take home with you.
- 1965, Eric Malpass, Morning's at seven‎, 'And now,' she said, 'what about that kiss my little pickle was going to give his old Auntie?'
- (baseball) A rundown.Jones was caught in a pickle between second and third.
- A children’s game with three participants that emulates a baseball rundownThe boys played pickle in the front yard for an hour.
- (slang) A penis.
- (slang) A pipe for smoking methamphetamine.Load some shards in that pickle.
- (metalworking) A bath of dilute sulphuric or nitric acid, etc., to remove burnt sand, scale, rust, etc., from the surface of castings, or other articles of metal, or to brighten them or improve their colour.
- In an optical landing system, the hand-held controller connected to the lens, or apparatus on which the lights are mounted.
Synonyms
- (penis) See also
Derived terms
Full definition of pickle
Verb
- To preserve food in a salt, sugar or vinegar solution.We pickled the remainder of the crop.
- To remove high-temperature scale and oxidation from metal with heated (often sulphuric) industrial acid.The crew will pickle the fittings in the morning.
- (programming) (in the Python programming language) To serialize.
- 2005, Peter Norton et al, Beginning PythonYou can now restore the pickled data. If you like, close your Python interpreter and open a new instance, to convince yourself...
- 2008, Marty Alchin, Pro DjangoTo illustrate how this would work in practice, consider a field designed to store and retrieve a pickled copy of any arbitrary Python object.
Origin 2
Perhaps from Scottish pickle 'to trifle, pilfer'