Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The salted and smoked meat from the back and sides of a pig.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Hog's flesh, especially the back and sides, salted or pickled and dried, usually in smoke.
  • noun Pork.
  • noun 3. A hog; hence, a grossly fat person.
  • noun 4. A rustic; a clown: in allusion to the fact that swine's flesh was the meat chiefly eaten by the rural population.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The back and sides of a pig salted and smoked; formerly, the flesh of a pig salted or fresh.
  • noun (Zoöl.) a beetle (Dermestes lardarius) which, especially in the larval state, feeds upon bacon, woolens, furs, etc. See Dermestes.
  • noun [Colloq.] to save one's self or property from harm or loss.
  • proper noun Roger Bacon. A celebrated English philosopher of the thirteenth century. Born at or near Ilchester, Somersetshire, about 1214: died probably at Oxford in 1294. He is credited with a recognition of the importance of experiment in answering questions about the natural world, recognized the potential importance of gunpowder and explosives generally, and wrote comments about several of the physical sciences that anticipated facts proven by experiment only much later.
  • proper noun Francis Bacon. A celebrated English philosopher, jurist, and statesman, son of Sir Nicholas Bacon. Born at York House, London, Jan. 22, 1561: died at Highgate, April 9, 1626, created Baron Verulam July 12, 1618, and Viscount St. Albans Jan. 27, 1621: commonly, but incorrectly, called Lord Bacon. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, April, 1573, to March, 1575, and at Gray's Inn 1575; became attached to the embassy of Sir Amias Paulet in France in 1576; was admitted to the bar in 1582; entered Parliament in 1584; was knighted in 1603; became solicitor-general in 1607, and attorney-general in 1613; was made a privy councilor in 1616, lord keeper in 1617, and lord chancellor in 1618; and was tried in 1621 for bribery, condemned, fined, and removed from office. A notable incident of his career was his connection with the Earl of Essex, which began in July, 1591, remained an intimate friendship until the fall of Essex (1600-01), and ended in Bacon's active efforts to secure the conviction of the earl for treason. (See Essex.) His great fame rests upon his services as a reformer of the methods of scientific investigation; and though his relation to the progress of knowledge has been exaggerated and misunderstood, his reputation as one of the chief founders of modern inductive science is well grounded. His chief works are the "Advancement of Learning," published in English as "The Two Books of Francis Bacon of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Human," in 1605; the "Novum organum sive indicia vera de interpretatione naturae," published in Latin, 1620, as a "second part" of the (incomplete) "Instauratio magna"; the "De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum," published in Latin in 1623; "Historia Ventorum" (1622), "Historia Vitae et Mortis" (1623), "Historia Densi et Rari" (posthumously, 1658), "Sylva Sylvarum" (posthumously, 1627), "New Atlantis," "Essays" (1597, 1612, 1625), "De Sapientia Veterum" (1609), "Apothegms New and Old," "History of Henry VII." (1622). Works edited by Ellis, Spedding, and Heath (7 vols. 1857); Life by Spedding (7 vols. 1861, 2 vols. 1878). See Shakspere.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Cured meat from the sides, belly, or back of a pig.
  • noun Thin slices of the above in long strips.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun English scientist and Franciscan monk who stressed the importance of experimentation; first showed that air is required for combustion and first used lenses to correct vision (1220-1292)
  • noun English statesman and philosopher; precursor of British empiricism; advocated inductive reasoning (1561-1626)
  • noun back and sides of a hog salted and dried or smoked; usually sliced thin and fried

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old French, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English bæc, back.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Middle English bacon ("meat from the back and sides of a pig"), from Anglo-Norman bacon, bacun ("ham, flitch, strip of lard"), from Old Low Frankish *bakō (“ham, flitch”), from Proto-Germanic *bakô, *bakkô (“back”), from Proto-Indo-European *bhAg- (“back, buttocks”). Cognate with Old High German bahho, bacho ("back, ham, side of bacon") (compare Alemannic German Bache, Bachen), Old Saxon baco ("back"), Dutch bake ("side of bacon, ham"), Old English bæc ("back"). More at back.

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word bacon.

Examples

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.

  • Heaven on a plate.

    May 6, 2007

  • The heaven-factor is restricted to a tiny margin between the thresholds of too squishy and too crispy. Get it right, and yes, heaven. But few can get it right. That or I'm just one picky dude.

    May 7, 2007

  • Your mom may just be a really good chef. My mom always baked our bacon in a two-level pan so it was less fattening. I didn't discover properly-fried bacon until college.

    May 8, 2007

  • Good chef? Nah, she just knows bacon. Well, she's a better chef than me. But I burn water.

    May 8, 2007

  • That *is* impressive.

    May 8, 2007

  • Bacon chocolate cake.

    September 24, 2007

  • Yum! Sounds as good as those baloney & grape jelly sandwiches I used to make. :-)

    September 24, 2007

  • If you're ever in Portland, OR, you should go to Voodoo Doughnut for the bacon doughnut...

    September 24, 2007

  • That's a doughnut? It looks like a cruise missile!

    September 24, 2007

  • At a recent family wedding, one of the uncles let slip that my mom, the health nut, knows how to make doughnuts from scratch. She's been holding out on us all these years.

    September 25, 2007

  • Well, tell her to give us that bacon doughnut recipe we asked for. ;-)

    September 25, 2007

  • *runs through, looking around for narwhal, does not see*

    August 28, 2008

  • Two remarkable men glorify that patronymic. Roger and Francis.

    February 4, 2009

  • Seen here, "deep-fried, bacon-wrapped bacon sprinkled on pork chops." (Runners-up: smearable beef packets, kielbasa chutney, squeeze-bottled chicken, bologna sherbet, and ham brulée.)

    July 7, 2009

  • Ha!

    July 9, 2009

  • Bacon caramels!

    December 29, 2009

  • I may cry happy diamond tears....

    December 31, 2009

  • Wow. That's...something.

    December 31, 2009

  • http://bacolicio.us

    December 31, 2009

  • I could be wrong...but isn't America coming out with bacon-flavoured jam?

    December 31, 2009

  • Expanding on whichbe’s suggestion, see also

            http://bacolicio.us/http://www.wordnik.com/words/bacon

    and, of course,

            http://bacolicio.us/http://bacolicio.us/

    September 20, 2011