Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun An English name for a herring which has been steeped for a short time, slightly salted, and partially smoke-dried, but not split open.

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

  • noun The common herring, esp. when of large size, smoked, and half dried; -- called also bloat herring.

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

  • noun UK A salted, and lightly smoked herring or mackerel.
  • noun North America A freshwater fish native to the Great Lakes; the species Coregonus hoyi.

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

  • noun large fatty herring lightly salted and briefly smoked

Etymologies

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Examples

  • "bloater" -- and enabling him to carry out more vigorously his schemes of

    The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands 1859

  • Second Lieutenant E.W. C. Perry and his mechanic, H.E. Parfitt, of No. 3 Squadron, who were flying a B.E. 8 machine (familiarly known as a 'bloater'), crashed over the aerodrome at Amiens; the machine caught fire, and both were killed.

    The War in the Air; Vol. 1 The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force Walter Alexander Raleigh 1891

  • If you answered no to any of these, you might be facing a bloater.

    Archive 2010-03-01 Janice Hardy 2010

  • If you answered no to any of these, you might be facing a bloater.

    Testing...Testing...is This Query On? Janice Hardy 2010

  • You've got a bloater--a novel that has taken on a life of its own.

    Archive 2010-03-01 Janice Hardy 2010

  • For Alex Salmond, whose resemblance to a bloater in quite uncanny, this is the first step on a road which he hopes will lead him to his Nobel Peace Prize.

    Archive 2008-02-03 2008

  • You've got a bloater--a novel that has taken on a life of its own.

    Testing...Testing...is This Query On? Janice Hardy 2010

  • For Alex Salmond, whose resemblance to a bloater in quite uncanny, this is the first step on a road which he hopes will lead him to his Nobel Peace Prize.

    Arise Nobel Laureate Salmond! 2008

  • Diane, I can hear a director yelling, "Bloater, where's the bloater!"

    Confederates in the Attic (copy) ____Maggie 2008

  • We thought of non-asthmatic, obstructive chronic lung disease as a spectrum with the prototypical blue bloater at one extreme and the pink puffer at the other with the plurality of patients falling in between having some feature of both.

    Archive 2009-01-01 james gaulte 2009

Comments

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  • "...the midshipmen's berth was rounding out their pease-pudding and pig's trotters with toasted bloaters, laid in at Valetta, and the smell eddying aft from the galley brought water to his mouth."

    --Patrick O'Brian, The Ionian Mission, 265

    February 14, 2008

  • It's a fish.

    January 1, 2012

  • A ripe corpse.

    December 7, 2016