Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A natural bed for oysters, consisting of gravel or crushed shells to which the oyster spawn may adhere.
- noun The spawn of the oyster.
- noun New England Clean trash or rubbish, such as string, paper, and cloth.
- noun A person or thing not highly regarded.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun Rubbish; lumber; stuff.
- To apply (cultch) to (an oyster-bed). See
culching .
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The
rocks ,crushed shells , and othersea detritus that create anoyster bed , where oysterspawn canattach themselves. - noun figuratively The accumulation of small household items of little value. (
New England expression.) - verb To prepare an oyster bed with such (culch) attachments.
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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The young probably find a natural "culch" in the many shells, cockle and others, that strew the rock, sand, and clay.
The Land of Midian — Volume 1 Richard Francis Burton 1855
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Minghella's movie is culture with a capital culch: it has ghosts playing Bach, a plumber who quotes Dylan Thomas and the kind of cinematography that holds a close-up of a white sheet on a clothesline, possibly signifying the Whiteness of Life.
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The young probably find a natural “culch” in the many shells, cockle and others, that strew the rock, sand, and clay.
The Land of Midian 2003
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The theatre looks amazing, check out bngr's post (complete with pics) on culch. ie here.
Irish Blogs 2010
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From the land of imitation Rolex, Ray Bans, Gucci and more, the roaming culch. ie correspondents give you the first of a scandalous series.
Irish Blogs 2009
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No, I just never have anything decent and culch related to write about.
Irish Blogs 2009
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Since “culch” can be read (or said) as short for “culture”, the website’s address is doubly apt.
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Oyster eggs, having become larvae, attach themselves to rocks, or to whatever ‘culch’ or artificial surface human beings lay down for them – old roof-tiles were used as a traditional oyster-base in Arcachon.
Margaret Visser · Shell Shock · LRB 22 February 1996 Margaret Visser 2019
xiaolongnu commented on the word culch
Sense 3 is often used in rural Maine (where I grew up in the 1970s) in the phrase "culch drawer," used to refer to that drawer in the kitchen where useful things like string, rubber bands, nails, wrapping paper and so on are collected. "Rubbish" doesn't seem to quite capture the sense of it - culch isn't stuff you throw out, it's stuff you keep because it might come in handy.
I think this sense must have a different etymology from the word which refers to an oyster-bed. I always believed it to come from "cullage," i.e., that which is held out and kept for some purpose; but I don't have any evidence to support it other than the observation that the -age construction (stumpage, yardage, etc.) was in common use.
June 25, 2009
Gammerstang commented on the word culch
(noun) - Great quantity of rain. --Jabez Good's Glossary of East Lincolnshire, 1900
February 6, 2018